


when everything feels like the movies

by glorious_spoon



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Coming Out, Domestic Fluff, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Feelings Realization, First Kiss, First Time, Fix-It, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Canon, Roommates, Slow Burn, Stanley Uris Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:40:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27748405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: If he were anyone else, this would be the moment for him to ask what the hell Eddie is doing: in California, generally, and showing up at Richie’s door with a stack of luggage and no explanation, specifically. It’s an interrogation that Eddie has been dreading mostly because he doesn’t actually have any good answers.(Or: after Derry, Eddie gets a divorce, moves into Richie's spare room, and starts to figure his life out.)
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 98
Kudos: 443





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Iris_ by The Goo Goo Dolls.

When the Uber pulls up outside of Richie's place, Eddie does a double-take, then checks the address on his phone even though he's had it memorized for months. He's not really sure what he was expecting, but somehow this pleasant little ranch house on a quiet dead-end street was not it.

The exterior is pale adobe with deep-set windows and a red tile roof, a two-car garage connected to the main building by an open breezeway. There’s a huge jade tree next to the mailbox, overhanging the decorative fence that separates the front yard from the dusty street. In lieu of grass is an attractive selection of hardy desert plants. Sustainable landscaping. The California drought issues always seemed kind of academic to Eddie, at least until he stepped out of the terminal at LAX two hours ago and the desert heat hit him like he was walking into a blast furnace.

He pays his driver and refuses the young man’s offer to help him with his luggage. His left arm is still in a sling and more or less useless, but his dignity is already wounded enough by having to take an Uber from the airport like some drunk college student because he didn’t have the forethought to rent a car when he booked his ticket yesterday.

Forethought has honestly not played much of a part in any of this so far. He hasn’t called to let Richie know he’s coming. He’s not even sure if Richie is _home_ right now.

He manages not to pull anything hauling his suitcases out of the trunk one-handed, letting them thunk on the dry pavement. The car pulls away in a swirl of dust and exhaust fumes, leaving Eddie standing on the sidewalk in the blazing heat of a Southern California summer and wondering belatedly what the hell he’s doing here.

Sweat trickles down the back of his neck, dampening his collar and making his shirt wilt uncomfortably against his body as he stares up at Richie’s front door and contemplates just slinking away to the coffeeshop he saw on his way here. There’s probably air-conditioning there. He can book a hotel room and then call Richie from there like a reasonable human being who didn’t show up on his front step out of the blue like a stray puppy.

On the other hand, it’s like six blocks away, and Eddie already feels like he’s fucking melting.

It’s the unpleasant prospect of having to haul all his carefully-stacked luggage down the street one-handed that finally gets him to the front step, which is shaded by a massive hydrangea in bloom. He rings the doorbell and tries not to feel like he’s vibrating out of his skin at the sound of it chiming through the house beyond.

This is stupid. It’s _stupid._ He should have called.

For several agonizing moments, there’s no response. Eddie shifts from one foot to the other, feeling his socks cling damply to his feet inside his shoes. He’s debating whether or not to ring the bell again when he finally hears the sound of footsteps, and then Richie’s voice saying, “Yeah, okay, hang on a sec, I’m coming, just—”

The door swings open. Blessedly cool air blows in his face as he blinks up at Richie, who is wearing board shorts and a truly appalling Hawaiian shirt that’s unbuttoned enough to show chest hair and a reddish tan. His hair is a damp wreck. He stares blankly at Eddie for a couple of seconds before his face splits into a huge grin.

“Holy shit, surprise Spaghetti delivery!” he exclaims, and yanks Eddie into a hug.

“Oh my god, fuck you, don’t call me that,” Eddie grumbles, hugging back gingerly. Richie is sweaty and too warm and smells like chlorine and sunscreen, with a hint of something acridly herbal that Eddie thinks might be weed. It’s objectively disgusting, and Eddie’s bad arm is trapped uncomfortably between them, and for some reason he can’t seem to let go.

“Holy shit,” Richie says again into his hair. He doesn’t sound at all upset, but his next words are still, “What the fuck are you doing here, Eds?”

“I, uh—sorry,” Eddie says, pulling back. “I should have called first.”

“Nah, it's cool, I love surprises,” Richie says easily. He peers over Eddie’s shoulder at his stack of suitcases, and Eddie flushes. “I see you packed light.”

“Look, just because you go on tour with three ugly t-shirts and a single pair of pants doesn’t mean you need to give me shit about traveling like a fucking adult. Can I come in? It’s like a million degrees out here, how do you live like this?”

“Air conditioning, man,” Richie says, leaning past him to lift his suitcases.

“I can do that.”

“Eh, I already got ‘em.”

“Rich—”

“No, if you try to take one of them now I’m going to drop them all and it’ll be a big mess—get the door, would you?” Richie adds, already retreating into the cool hallway with Eddie’s luggage. Left with no other dignified option, Eddie follows him in, pulling the door shut behind him.

The inside of the house is more what he would have expected from Richie: a comfortable pigsty with a teetering stack of mail on the table by the door, shirts draped over the backs of chairs, vintage horror movie posters on the walls. Most of them are framed, but that’s just about the only nod that Eddie can see toward an adult aesthetic. He thinks of the house in Queens where he’s lived for nearly ten years, with its beige walls and tastefully coordinated decor, and he thinks of how fucking disgusting Richie’s bedroom always was when they were kids and how it still felt more like home than his own did.

He doesn’t let himself connect those two thoughts. This is all embarrassing enough already.

“Hey, sorry, if I’d known you were coming I would have cleaned up a little,” Richie says, steering them past an open-plan kitchen with dirty dishes in the sink and several beer bottles on the counter. There’s a short hallway beyond with three open doors; Eddie can see a sunny room with an unmade bed and a pair of boxers on the floor through one of them, and then he follows Richie through the door on the far end of the hallway. This room is smaller, with a vaguely dusty, unused air. There’s a queen bed tucked in the corner, but most of the floor space is taken up by a drum set.

“Jesus,” Eddie says. “You still play?”

Richie shrugs, but he looks pleased. “Not like—seriously. Couple friends of mine do a pick-up band sometimes, when we’re all in town at the same time. Just casual shit, you know?" He slides into an unnervingly spot-on imitation of Mark Knopfler's sing-talking cadence. " _He’s got a daytime job, he’s doin’ alright._ ”

“God, you’re so fucking old.”

Richie laughs at that, a bright clear sound. “I got like six months on you, Eduardo, don’t start that shit. Let me go grab some sheets."

"What, you don't have a housekeeper?"

"Does it _look_ like I have a housekeeper?” Richie laughs on his way out of the room. “How fuckin’ loaded do you think I am?”

The answer to that, actually, is _pretty fucking loaded._ It might not be the tacky-ass giant McMansion he was half-expecting, but Eddie has researched Los Angeles real estate enough in the past month to know that the house they’re sitting in, with its three bedrooms and its nicely landscaped yard and the pool he can see glittering out back between the shades of the window, is worth north of a million dollars in this neighborhood.

Still. Richie has a point. It’s a far cry from their dingy Maine childhood, but it’s not exactly live-in staff wealthy. That’s just as well. Eddie thinks he can just barely cope with staying here with Richie. Since apparently Richie is letting him stay, no questions asked—since apparently that’s a thing now. He couldn’t cope with strangers.

Of course, the moment he has that thought, a door opens somewhere across the house, followed by the sound of soft footsteps on the floor. Then an unfamiliar woman’s voice calling, “Rich? You get lost in there, babe?”

“Oh, shit, right,” Richie says, ducking out of a closet at the far end of the hall with an armload of sheets. He slips past Eddie to deposit them on the bare mattress, then heads back out into the main house. Bemused and slightly wary, Eddie follows him.

There’s a woman standing in the sunken living room, just inside the sliding glass doors that open onto the patio. She’s their age or thereabouts, good-looking in a very casual California kind of way: sun-streaked hair in a messy bun, shades hooked in the neckline of her loose, colorful sundress.

She looks, Eddie thinks with an odd sinking feeling, exactly like the sort of woman he’d have expected Richie to be dating. He didn’t even realize—

“Hey, Sandy,” Richie says easily. “Sorry. Just getting Eddie settled in here.”

“Oh,” she says, and Eddie winces in expectation of a cold look, of maybe Richie getting dragged off to a discreet corner for a hissed lecture. That’s definitely what Myra would have done if he’d ever had the gall to dump a surprise houseguest on her out of the blue. He was always vaguely aware that that sort of thing was intensely awkward for everyone who had to witness it, but now that he’s faced with the prospect of being the witness he wants to sink through the floor.

Sandy raises her eyebrows at Richie, taking a sip from the beer bottle in her hand, then smiles. “ _Eddie_ , huh?”

“Yep, this is Eddie,” Richie says. There’s a significant undercurrent to his voice that Eddie can’t read, but at least it doesn’t sound like a scolding is imminent. “You’ll love him, he’s even meaner than you are.”

Eddie shoots him a glare, then very deliberately turns toward the woman, who is grinning in a way that creates a weird twinning effect: it’s nearly the exact expression that Richie has on his face. He has a wild thought about dogs and their owners that he manages not to voice, because while he’s not above insulting Richie to his face in his own home he does usually try to make a good impression on strangers. Even if it’s not likely to last long with Richie here to goad him.

“Edward Kaspbrak,” he says pleasantly. “It’s nice to meet you.”

He holds out his hand to shake, and she does. Her grip is firm, her short nails painted in bright pink and bright orange, sunset colors, alternating from fingertip to fingertip.

“Sandra Delano. Sandy. It’s nice to meet you too. Richie has told me _so_ much about you.”

“Oh my fucking god, at least let me get another beer before you two start roasting me,” Richie groans.

“I didn’t say anything!”

“You’re paranoid, babe,” Sandy adds, tucking herself against Richie’s side. He drapes one long arm around her shoulders. It’s familiar, the way they touch each other. The way they fit together like two shapes that have worn each other into a comfortable groove.

It’s not—quite what Eddie would have expected from Richie, if he’s honest, although the truth is that he probably doesn’t actually know Richie well enough anymore to say. He already knew that the crude, lazy girlfriend jokes were bullshit, but Sandy doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’d put up with that in any case.

He definitely doesn’t know her well enough to ask. He _does_ know that it’s none of his business. Still, the display of easy domesticity rubs like a jagged edge at something he hadn’t even realized was sore.

He thought he had that, with Myra. Somehow, he never twigged to the distinction between _comfort_ and _disinterest_. It makes him feel stupid, stupid and tired and hollowed out with how much time he’s wasted. With how fast the marriage and the life he tried to build with her just unravelled once he pulled on a single thread.

Richie meets his eyes over Sandy’s head, and whatever he sees makes him frown, pull away from her slightly. “You good, Eds?”

“Don’t call me that,” Eddie says automatically. “Yeah, I’m good. I just—whew. Long flight. Flights. I had a three-hour layover in Dallas, _god,_ what a germ-infested hellhole.”

“How many bottles of hand sanitizer did you go through? Be honest.”

“Fuck you.” He glances at Sandy, then adds, “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she says easily. “He brings it out in people.”

“ _Mean_ ,” Richie complains, but he looks delighted. “I invite you into my home, I let you drink my beer and swim in my pool, and this is how you repay me?”

Sandy reaches up to ruffle his already very ruffled hair. “Baby, I am a fucking delight and you should be grateful for my company. I gotta go, anyway. I have that thing tonight—”

“Oh, right, shit, I forgot,” Richie says, and loops an arm around her to pull her into another quick hug. “Hey, good luck. You’re gonna kill it.”

“Thanks, Rich,” she says, squeezing him back. She leaves the door open as she steps back onto the patio to set her beer bottle down and hook an oversized woven bag over her shoulder, and even the minute that takes feels like standing in front of a hot oven. Then she steps back inside, pulling the sliding glass door shut behind her. “Eddie, it was so great to meet you. How long are you in town?”

“Uh,” Eddie says. He glances at Richie, but Richie seems distracted by something out the kitchen window, so there’s no help there. “I’m… not sure. This was all a little spur of the moment, sorry.”

“Hey, it’s cool. Christ knows Richie needs somebody to keep him in line now that he’s off his manager’s leash—”

“Oh _come on,_ Sandy—”

“—but we’ll have to hang out sometime. You know I love you,” she adds, clearly to Richie, “but Steve was a fucking nightmare, you can do so much better.”

“Yeah, who died and made you my bubbe, huh?”

“Cute,” she says, grinning. She leans up on her toes to kiss his cheek, gives Eddie a jaunty wave, and strides back through the house through the front door. It clicks shut behind her. Richie rubs the back of his head, looking slightly sheepish.

“So, uh,” Eddie says, then stops.

“Sorry. She can be a little…” Richie trails off and wobbles a hand back and forth, like Sandy isn’t exactly the kind of person Eddie would have imagined him dating, if it had ever occurred to him to seriously imagine any such thing at all.

“No, she seems great,” Eddie says, very sincerely. He’s glad that he can say that sincerely. And then, trying hard not to sound like anything at all, “She doesn’t live here?”

“Sandy? Shit, no, she’d murder me in three days flat. She’s shacking up with some dude who owns a head shop in Pasadena. They just got a dog. Practice run for babies or something, I don’t fuckin’ know. I kinda feel like we’re too old for that shit, but she’s convinced it’s kismet.”

“Oh. I, uh, thought you guys were, you know. A thing. You seemed really—” he breaks off, vaguely embarrassed.

“Nope. We dated for a while, like, fifteen years ago, but uh.” Richie pauses, makes an odd face, then says, “It didn’t work out.”

“Sorry, dude.”

Richie shrugs. “I was a really shitty boyfriend.”

“Oh,” Eddie says again, awkwardly unsurprised.

“Don’t sound so shocked, _dude_ ,” Richie says dryly.

“Oh, don’t give me that shit, you’re barely house-trained as it is.”

“As long as someone remembers to take me for walkies,” Richie says, and cackles when Eddie flips him off. “Hey, speaking of, will the second Mrs. K be joining us? See if I can collect the whole set?”

“How is that _speaking of_ ,” Eddie starts to say, then cuts himself off. Because. He probably should have actually brought that up before now. “I, uh. No. She’s still in New York.” Richie is just watching him, his smile fading into a serious look that means he gets where this is going even before Eddie heaves a deep breath and says, “We’re getting a divorce, actually.”

It’s like letting go of a backpack full of rocks; he feels lighter the moment the words are out. It’s the first time he’s told anyone, other than Myra and the subsequent set of disinterested lawyers who are currently drawing up their paperwork. It’s all been intensely civil. Myra wanted him to stay in the guest room while he looked for his own place, and Eddie didn’t have the heart to tell her that he’d rather perform amateur field surgery on himself in a sewer, a comparison he is unfortunately qualified to make.

“Oh,” Richie says, very seriously, after a long pause. “Well, shit.”

“You can laugh,” Eddie says somewhat desperately. “I basically married my fucking mother, we both know it, you can laugh. It’s funny.”

Richie makes that odd face again. “Nah, man. I’ll get to it.”

“The suspense isn’t better.”

“Give me some fuckin’ credit,” Richie says, and slings a warm, heavy arm over Eddie’s shoulders. It’s as annoying as it always was that he has to lean down to do it. “Have you had dinner yet? When’s the last time you ate?”

“Uh.” Eddie squints, trying to count back. There was no way in hell he was going to touch airplane food, so it must have been at the cleanest-looking airport bar back in Dallas/Fort Worth. A plain burger and a plate of fries that sat like a greasy stone in the pit of his stomach even after he followed them up with one more gin and tonic than was strictly advisable. He’s not hungover, but the lingering aftereffects are definitely contributing to his generally dazed condition. “Like… noon, I guess. I ate at the airport.”

“Ooh. Living life on the edge.”

“Are you still going to be like this if I get food poisoning?”

“Almost definitely,” Richie says absently, but he’s frowning a little in thought. “Dallas is two hours ahead of us, but it's dinnertime anyway. Come on. I’m pretty sure I don’t have any food you’ll eat in the house, but there’s a taco truck down the street that should meet your exacting hygiene specifications. They wash their hands and everything.”

“I hate that I can’t tell if you’re kidding,” Eddie mutters. “I’m not eating at a fucking taco truck, Richie.”

“When in Rome,” Richie says cheerfully, and uses the arm he still has around Eddie’s shoulders to steer him out the door.

* * *

The tacos are fucking amazing. They’re so good it actively makes Eddie mad. At one of the blue grate tables with a flimsy shade to keep the worst of the sun off, Richie watches him lick sauce off of his fingers with an expression that’s somewhere between hilarity and awe.

“I feel like a Peeping Tom here,” he says. “Is that what your o-face looks like?”

Eddie’s mouth is full, so he balls up the empty foil wrapper with his good hand and bounces it off of Richie’s forehead in lieu of a retort.

“Fuck you,” he says, after he swallows. “I was hungry.”

“And the tacos are amazing. Admit it.”

Eddie sighs, wiping his fingers on the stack of napkins and then balling them up in the flimsy disposable basket that their food came in. “And the tacos are amazing. Fine.”

Richie grins and holds out a hand for Eddie to slap. Eddie leaves him hanging for a long moment, but he doesn’t drop his hand, and he grins wider when Eddie finally gives in and high-fives him. It’s like being fucking fourteen all over again, except that now Richie is tall and broad and comfortable in his skin in a way he never was when Eddie knew him in Derry. Either time. California seems to have loosened him, like the heat has melted some of the tension out of his bones.

It’s unnerving, is what it is.

If he were anyone else, this would be the moment for him to ask what the hell Eddie is doing: in California, generally, and showing up at Richie’s door with a stack of luggage and no explanation, specifically. It’s an interrogation that Eddie has been dreading mostly because he doesn’t actually have any good answers.

Instead, Richie starts twisting his straw wrapper into some complex pattern that eventually reveals itself to be a weird, spindly bird; he perches it on the table and it starts to unravel almost immediately before a hot gust of wind blows it away. Eddie tries to grab at it, but it’s already too late.

“Let it go, man, let it go,” Richie laughs when Eddie starts to rise out of his seat. The straw-paper bird unravels into the street, losing its shape a moment before a passing car runs it over. “I’ll make you another one, if you want.”

“Since when do you do origami?” Eddie asks, feeling weirdly out of sorts.

“Everybody needs a hobby,” Richie says. Then he splays his long fingers like a maestro and adds, “Besides, it’s good for keeping these babies nimble. Your mom will thank me later.”

“You’re so fucking gross,” Eddie sighs, and Richie laughs and reaches for the other straw wrapper.

* * *

He doesn’t ask again.

They go back to the house afterwards. Richie puts clean sheets on the bed and pulls a couple of beers out of the fridge, and once the sun goes down and the temperature drops a little they wander outside to sit by the pool while Richie spins out absurd and negligently honest stories about awkward celebrity encounters he’s had in L.A. and he _doesn’t fucking ask._

 _Hey, Eds, no offense, but what the fuck are you doing in L.A., for real?_ Eddie mouths at himself in the mirror that night. The bathroom is tiled in deep greens and blues and with the door shut it feels like standing on the ocean floor. The long sink counter could hold a pharmacy’s worth of toiletries, but it’s bare; there’s a bathroom off of the master bedroom, too, and apparently that’s where Richie stores all of his personal effects. There’s not so much as a spare toothbrush in here.

Eddie sets his toiletry bag down and starts unpacking. It feels somehow like he’s getting away with something: claiming his own space in Richie’s home one jar of eye-cream at a time. He can hear Richie whistling a meandering little tune from two rooms away as he gets ready for bed, but when he comes out of the bathroom, the house is dark. He peers through the living room; the lights reflecting from the pool cast shifting blue shadows on the floor. There’s less ambient light here than Eddie is used to. Los Angeles is big, but it’s big in a sprawling, stretched out way that’s as different as can be to the cramped and towering buildings of New York. Miles upon miles of suburbs and low buildings built for earthquakes.

When he goes to plug his phone in there’s a missed call from his lawyer and two from Myra. Eddie lets his thumb hover over the voicemail icon before he dismisses it. It’s too late to call his lawyer back in any case, and at this point he should probably just block Myra’s number and be done with it. He’s already got a pretty good idea of what her voicemails will say.

_Eddie, I just want to take care of you—I worry about you, you’re still recovering and you know those hotels are just awful with bacteria. Have you been keeping up with your physical therapy? I think you should talk to your doctor about it—I’ll do it if you’d like—I worry about you, I worry about you, I worry about you—_

It’s a worry born of something that was probably once affection, calcified into resentful habit. He knows that. It doesn’t really help.

He sets his phone on the charger and sits down on the corner of the bed to do his nightly stretches. They still leave him sore, the damaged muscles in his left arm and shoulder trembling. He’s getting better, though. He knows he is. It’s frustratingly slow, but he's getting better.

He rubs Mederma carefully over the puckered, livid scar on his chest, then twists awkwardly to get the bigger one on his back. It would be easier to have someone else do it; certainly Myra offered over and over again, even after he’d moved into the spare room for two smothering days before booking it to the hotel. He never let her. But he’s thinking of Richie suddenly, in the bedroom just down the hall. He’s probably still awake, and he’d definitely help Eddie out if he asked.

For some reason, that thought is almost more unnerving. Richie’s hands would be bigger than his, and warmer; he always runs so hot. He’s never really been particularly gentle with Eddie, but Eddie thinks he’d be gentle about this. He remembers how Richie’s hands shook while he pressed his balled-up jacket to the wound back there in the sewer, how he apologized over and over again in a quiet, unsteady voice while Eddie yelped and sobbed and cursed at him.

Eddie shakes his head, forcibly banishing the memory. He twists a little more to get the last of the gel on, then caps the tube and tucks it back into his bag before pulling his t-shirt on and climbing into bed. It’s cool enough with the air conditioning that he actually needs the blankets that Richie left, which are soft and mismatched and smell of unfamiliar detergent. The mattress is softer than the one at home, and he can see the yellow light from the street lamp outside striped across the wall where it comes in through the blinds, reflecting on the gleaming metal fixtures on Richie’s drum set.

He expects it to take forever for him to fall asleep, but whether it’s the long day or the beer or the lingering sun-drunk drowsiness, it’s only a few minutes before he drifts down into unconsciousness.

He dreams of straw-paper birds sprouting colorful feathers as they leap into the dry desert sky, traffic rushing by beneath them and the crashing ocean stretched out beyond. Turtles as big as houses swimming peacefully in the deep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Eddie goes for a jog, watches a shitty 90's stoner comedy, and contemplates his life choices. Also, food is love.

He calls his lawyer the next day and gets a list of the documents he still needs to send over. He also informs her of the change in mailing address, and cringes at the calmly non-judgmental tone in her voice when she takes the information down.

He deletes Myra’s voicemails without listening to them, but still can't bring himself to block her number.

Richie is in the kitchen when he finally comes out, barefoot in pajamas with his hair all over the place, his glasses smudged, his stubble coming in rough and graying. He’s mumbling at the coffeemaker while it percolates. When Eddie pauses at the far side of the counter, his head lifts; he blinks several times, like he’s trying to slot Eddie’s existence into reality, then smiles. It’s sleepy and oddly soft like he always was after sleepovers as a kid, early in the morning before his brain switched on and his mouth started running.

“Morning,” he says. “Coffee, or is that an offense against the Edward Kaspbrak school of healthy morning routines?”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, because Richie has somehow managed to head off his lecture about caffeine and heart disease in one fell swoop. “Do you have any orange juice?”

“Probably,” Richie says, nodding toward the fridge, and Eddie slips past him to pull open the door. Richie shifts over to let him pass; their shoulders bump briefly before he moves completely out of Eddie’s space.

There is a bottle of orange juice in there, along with several takeout containers and half-full jars of condiments and absolutely nothing else in the way of food. Eddie checks the expiration date before he takes it out of the fridge, and looks up to find Richie giving him an amused look.

“What?” he says.

“Absolutely nothing, Eduardo,” Richie says. He pulls open the cabinet next to the fridge and stretches up slightly, his faded t-shirt riding up to bare a strip of pale stomach and dark happy-trail before he comes back with a glass, which he hands to Eddie. “Unless you wanna drink out of the bottle. That’s what I always do.”

“That’s disgusting,” Eddie says, but he pours himself a glass anyway. He’s definitely shared worse than spit with Richie at this point. “Uh. Just so you know, I told my lawyer I’m staying here, so if she needs to send anything over—”

“Cool,” Richie says easily, instead of asking Eddie why the fuck he thinks he’s going to be here long enough for that. “So if I want to get the lowdown on your sordid divorce situation, I just need to go through your mail?”

“I will smother you and leave your body out in the desert to be eaten by wild animals,” Eddie tells him calmly, ducking his head so that Richie can’t see him smile. “No one would blame me.”

“I mean, I do still have your ex-wife’s number—”

“Do. Not,” Eddie says, gesturing at him with the hand holding the glass, so sharply that juice sloshes over onto his wrist. He licks it up absently, and Richie blinks and turns back to the counter to pour himself a cup of coffee.

“So is this something we’re keeping on the DL, or are you telling everybody else?”

 _Everybody else_ in this case mostly meaning the rest of the Losers. _This_ presumably meaning either the divorce or the fact that Eddie just shlepped every article of clothing he owns across the country to show up on Richie’s doorstep without warning.

Either way. He shrugs. There’s a group chat that they mostly use for keeping up with Mike and his rambling road-trip across the continental United States. He’s in Arizona right now, and the pictures he posts are sun-soaked and joyful.

Eddie doesn’t really post anything other than emoji reactions to the pictures, or to Bev’s cheerful updates on her roommate’s ongoing, one-sided feud with Ben, but he’s been in touch with the rest of them. Loosely in touch, anyway. He is, as it turns out, entirely out of practice with having friends outside of the occasional work-related happy hour that he generally ducks out of as soon as it’s polite.

He’s always just kind of assumed that that’s what adulthood is like. Even after he remembered the intensity of his childhood friendships—who the hell has the time or energy for that in their forties, anyway? Half the people Eddie knows have kids now, falling easily into social groups centered around PTA’s and after-school activities, and everyone else works seventy hours a week. He’s never thought of his life as being particularly empty. Neatly ordered, sure. Maybe a little bit boring. But not _bad._

“Eds?” Richie says, gentler, and Eddie becomes aware that he’s just staring down at his orange juice, which has started sloshing again as his hand shakes.

“Sorry,” he says, and sets it down on the counter before he can spill any more. “My doctor says it’s residual nerve damage from, you know—” he waves his shaking hand vaguely to indicate the whole ‘skewered by an extradimensional alien clown’ situation. “It comes and goes. It’s getting better. I promise I won’t drop your dishes on the floor.”

“That’s not really—” Richie breaks off and shakes his head. “Never mind. Here, come on, sit down. I’ll go do some shopping today so we can have real food tomorrow, but I do have some stale Pop-tarts in the back of the cupboard. S’Mores or strawberry shortcake?”

“You are literally forty-one years old,” Eddie says. He flexes his hand until it steadies, then takes his orange juice and goes to sit down at the little kitchen table tucked into a sunny nook. The chairs are mismatched and colorful, and there’s a stained-glass Yoda figure hanging in the window to catch the light and cast it across the surface of the table in shifting spikes of emerald green. It’s utterly ridiculous, and Eddie loves it. He wonders if it was a gift, or if it was something that Richie actually went and bought for himself.

“Yeah, man, I’m fucking with you,” Richie says. “There’s bagels and cream cheese, or cereal. Probably not any cereal you’ll eat, though, honestly. Or, wait. Shit. You have that gluten thing, right? I can run out...”

Eddie sighs. “Bagels are fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. I went and got tested, once I got back to New York. I don’t have anything. Just more bullshit my mom made up.” He clears his throat. “Uh, if you show me where everything is, I can—”

“I’ll get it, sit down. Drink your orange juice.”

“You’re not my fucking mother, dickbag.”

Richie grins the way he always does when Eddie bites back at him, as if he finds it delightful instead of absurd and childish like Eddie knows it is. Something about Richie always catapults him back to being fourteen again. Makes him _want_ to be fourteen again, young and vicious and so wired on Richie’s attention that he could vibrate out of his skin.

“Oh,” Richie says, “I could never compete with a lady like Sonia Kaspbrak.”

“Thank Christ,” Eddie mutters.

Richie snorts. “You want it toasted?”

“Is that a trick question?”

“Toasted it is,” Richie says, nodding to himself. Eddie watches him as he moves through the sunny kitchen. It’s still weird to look at someone and find them both so foreign and so familiar. Richie is taller now, and broad, the lanky build he had as a kid filled in with muscle and fat. Eddie knows he’s changed at least as much, but he still finds it disorienting to look at this grown man sipping his coffee and juggling a stack of bagels with his free hand, and know that he’s the same kid who used to trash-talk Eddie at the arcade every day after school and tutor him on his English homework and sneak in through his window whenever his mother was on a tear.

To know that thirty years later and three thousand miles away Richie still looks like home.

He drinks his orange juice, and he watches Richie toast the bagels and dig a carton of cream cheese out of the fridge. He brings everything out on a stacked pair of plates and deposits it on the table in front of Eddie, then sinks into the other chair, stretching his long legs out and crossing them at the ankle, resting his coffee cup on his stomach.

“Thanks,” Eddie says, reaching for a plate.

“Don’t mention it.”

Eddie pauses to glance up under his brows, but Richie just takes a long drink of his coffee, gazing out the window with an innocent expression.

“And uh. I will tell everybody. About the divorce. I just—”

“Hey, man, take your time. Shit’s complicated, right? Or, like, I assume it is. Nobody’s ever been stupid enough to marry me in the first place, but Bev could probably talk you through it.”

“Bev has enough shit on her plate, she doesn’t need mine,” Eddie says, and Richie tilts his head in acknowledgement. Bev only talks about the bad stuff to mine it for viciously funny anecdotes; she’s oddly like Richie in that way. But Eddie saw the bruises on her wrists back in Derry. They all did. He doesn’t know for sure, but he’s pretty sure that Richie and Bill at least have tendered very sincere offers to go bury Tom Rogan up to his neck in an anthill. She wouldn’t take them up on it, of course; Bev Marsh handles her own business. But still.

“Okay, fair enough. I just wanted to know if we needed to get our stories straight.”

“What is this, the mob? No, we don’t need to get our stories straight. If I wanted it to be a secret, I wouldn’t have told you in the first place.”

“Ouch,” Richie laughs. “You know I’m an actor, right? I can sell a story. I got the chops, baby.”

“I don’t think playing the stripper’s boyfriend in _Baked Alaskans II: Spawning Season_ actually counts as acting, dude.”

Richie starts to grin. “Eddie.”

“Don’t,” Eddie says, with a sudden sinking feeling.

“Eddie Spaghetti, did you watch my movies?”

“No, I looked up your fucking IMDb page,” Eddie snaps, before he realizes that might actually be worse. “Do _not_ start, I can’t believe I need to explain to you how much more embarrassing your filmography is for you than it is for me, oh my _god._ ”

He takes a huge bite of his bagel as Richie throws his head back, cackling. “Eds gets off a good one! Oh, man. Don’t knock it, though, that was my first big career break.”

“That’s so fucking sad.”

“Right?” Richie sighs, leaning back with a nostalgic look on his face. “They shot the whole thing in Vancouver in January and I ended up staying in this fucking—shitty ancient Airstream camper. We had to use a propane space heater, it’s a wonder we didn’t blow the whole thing sky-high with all the hotboxing we were doing.”

“Jesus,” Eddie says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You can’t tell me this shit, man, you’re going to give me an ulcer.”

“I survived a killer clown from outer space, no way was I gonna get taken out by a joint.”

“That is not how probability _works_ , Rich.”

Richie grins, sets his coffee down, and reaches one long arm across the table to ruffle Eddie’s hair. Eddie ducks away, scowling, trying to look more annoyed than he actually is. By the way Richie is smiling at him, he’s pretty sure it’s not working.

“We can watch it tonight if you want,” he says. “You can rag on my acting and terrible facial hair.”

“It can’t possibly be worse than your facial hair is now,” Eddie grumbles, and submits to having his hair ruffled again before Richie downs the rest of his coffee and wanders off to go get dressed.

* * *

_Baked Alaskans II_ is on Netflix, as it turns out, and Eddie doesn’t put up more than a token protest when Richie cues it up that evening, although the fact that he’s been bribed with beer and a giant bowl of popcorn might have something to do with it. That, and Richie actually did go shopping, and cooked a surprisingly passable stir-fry for dinner. Eddie feels full and lazy and like he’s been getting away with something by wiling away his entire day under the umbrella next to the pool, dangling his feet in the water and alternating between napping and reading a shitty horror paperback from Richie’s bookshelf.

No work. No Myra. No stifling New York townhouse. Just the blue water and the scorching sunlight and the hot dry air that’s nothing like any summer he’s ever experienced back East. It feels like some strange liminal space where time doesn’t quite exist anymore.

Maybe, he thinks, this is what a vacation is supposed to feel like. He’s taken his allotted three weeks every year like clockwork: a week around the holidays to visit Myra’s parents and sisters; two weeks in the summer to rent some scrupulously chosen hotel room in whatever vacation hotspot Myra had read about in _Travel & Leisure_, where he’d spend the whole time dutifully trotting around to the local attractions and counting down the days until he could go back to the office.

In retrospect, that probably should have been a warning sign that there was something wrong with his marriage. One of many.

The temperature drops after nightfall, by which time Richie has finangled him onto the couch with popcorn and beer and cued up Netflix.

“Fine,” Eddie sighs when he pulls up the movie, trying not to sound too amused. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Oh ye of little faith. I’ll have you know this is a cinematic masterpiece,” Richie says, as some shitty A1 pop cover starts playing over the opening credits.

“Masterpiece my _ass_ ,” Eddie says, and leans over to quickly steal the popcorn bowl out of his lap, dodging his swatting hands. “Fuck off, I’m watching the movie.”

It really is a fucking _terrible_ movie, and Richie’s character doesn’t even show up until two thirds of the way through. Eddie’s attention is wandering out of sheer self-preservation, and then he looks back at the screen, and there’s Richie all of a sudden: twenty-three years old, all pale skin and awkward sharp angles in boxer shorts and an appalling goatee as he slouches onto the screen.

“I’m pretty sure I was actually high when we shot this,” Richie says contemplatively from the other side of the couch. His glasses reflect the light from the TV; his onscreen counterpart, gesturing animatedly with a joint, isn’t wearing any. “Really adds to the authenticity of the scene, don’t you think?”

“Please tell me you’re wearing contacts in this,” Eddie retorts.

“Nah, I couldn’t afford them. The set director was about ready to murder me after all the shit I knocked over. The outtakes are funnier than the fucking movie, I swear, man.”

“Oh my _god_ ,” Eddie hisses, weirdly furious. There’s just something about the sight of Richie like this, so much younger than he is now, so much older than the kid Eddie remembers: something about the visual reminder of all those lost years in between. Eddie is getting maudlin over a movie that has an 18% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and it’s utterly infuriating. “What the fuck is growing out of your chin here, anyway? It looks like you glued roadkill to your face.”

Richie doubles over laughing, spilling popcorn all over the couch, and from there it rapidly devolves into a food fight like they’re both literally thirteen again. By the end of it Eddie’s shoulder is twinging and his stomach aches from laughing and he has popcorn kernels down the back of his pants because Richie always fought dirty and that’s one thing that hasn’t changed in all this time.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he gasps into the couch cushion where Richie is pinning him down. His weight mostly resting on Eddie’s good shoulder, but he’s still fucking _heavy_ , pressed close like this. “Get off me, asshole, I’m injured and you weigh like fifty tons.”

He’s mostly joking, but Richie jerks away like he’s been electrocuted. “Shit, sorry.”

“No, it’s fine, fuck.” Eddie straightens up, rolling his bad shoulder cautiously to see if the twinge is going to tighten up into a real spasm. He hopes not. He’s been avoiding his muscle relaxants; he doesn’t like the way they make him feel, groggy and spaced out in the non-fun way, and he shouldn’t be taking them after the two beers he’s had anyway.

The twinge subsides after a minute, leaving a lingering ache behind that’s not much worse than what Eddie’s usually dealing with these days. Richie peers at him as he straightens up. “You okay?”

“Yep.”

“Seriously, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…” he gestures vaguely at Eddie. “You know. Manhandled you.”

“ _Manhandled_ ,” Eddie huffs. “Like I couldn’t kick your ass one-handed.”

“Oh, I know you could,” Richie says, with a quick, odd smile. Before Eddie can get a read on it, he’s heaving himself up off the couch and reaching for the remote to switch off the TV. “Look, let me get the vacuum and take care of all this, you go dig the popcorn out of your underwear before you get a rash.”

“Yeah, thanks for that,” Eddie grumbles, doing an awkward little hop to try to shake some of it out as he stands, without much success. He hears Richie laugh behind him, and flips him off without turning.

Richie is already putting the vacuum away when he comes back out, cleaned up and changed into pajamas. He’s frowning thoughtfully in the general direction of the couch, but folds the expression away visibly when Eddie comes back out. “So, what’s the verdict?”

“How much did you fucking make on that movie?” Eddie demands.

“Uh.” Richie squints. “I honestly don’t remember. It was enough to pay off my car? Which was like a 1992 Nissan Sentra, so, grain of salt. Why?”

“You should stick with stand-up.”

“You said my stand-up sucked.”

“It does,” Eddie tells him. “You should write your own shit. If people can get paid money to write that brain-sucking atrocity I just watched, you can make up your own stupid dick jokes.”

He means to follow it up with a real insult, but Richie is smiling. It isn’t even smug, which Eddie would know how to deal with. No; this is soft and startled, the way Richie always looked when he wound up on the receiving end of an unexpected compliment. Eddie didn’t even really mean it as one, except—well. Maybe he did.

“I’ll, I mean. I’ve been thinking about it,” Richie says. “After Steve and I, uh—” he makes finger quotes and drops his voice, intoning dramatically, “— _parted ways_ , I’ve been looking at trying to do some new shit. So, you know. Maybe.”

He shrugs a little. It’s awkward, almost shy.

“Good,” Eddie says. “I’ll buy you a notebook.”

Richie laughs. “I’m a big-shot movie star, I can buy my own notebooks.”

“You’re an asshole, and I’m going to bed,” Eddie says, but he bumps into Richie’s shoulder fondly as he passes, and Richie, grinning, bumps him back.

* * *

He finally tells the rest of them the following morning, while Richie is at some studio meeting that he’s not technically allowed to talk about. He does it in the group chat to rip the bandaid off all at once, a short message: _Hey, FYI, Myra and I are getting a divorce. I’m fine and I don’t want to talk about it. Hope everybody’s doing well._

Bev calls him an hour later, and he contemplates not answering for a moment before he sighs and picks up. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“I was actually going to call you anyway,” she says lightly. Eddie takes a breath, and she adds, “Seriously. Ben has graduated to home repairs. He fixed the railing on the back step this morning. I think Kay is relenting.”

“Can’t she just hire somebody to do that?”

“Yeah, but he’s trying to prove something to her.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Eddie says, like it isn’t exactly what he’d expect from Ben. “What, that he’s the hero in some shitty holiday rom-com?”

“I’ll take a shitty holiday rom-com over the low-budget horror movie that we’ve been living in,” Bev says, which: fair enough. “Besides, it’s July.”

“Shitty summer rom-com, then,” Eddie says. “Didn’t Richie do one of those?”

“All respect due to Richie—”

“—so, none, then—”

“—but I don’t see anyone casting him as a romantic lead somehow.”

“I think he was like. The best friend character, or something. The roommate? I don’t know, I didn’t actually watch it.”

Just the clips that Richie was in, but he’s not going to tell Bev that. She’ll absolutely tell Richie, and he’ll never hear the end of it.

“Huh,” Bev says thoughtfully, but she doesn’t pursue it. “Anyway, he stayed for coffee afterward, and there wasn’t even any bloodshed.” Eddie snorts into the phone, and she laughs. “No, seriously, it’s good. We’re taking everything slow, which is… it’s nice, you know? I mean, it’s Ben, he’s so fucking sweet about everything, but I’m still, I don’t know. I’m glad she’s trying to look out for me. I think I—forgot. What it’s like to have people who really care about me. Or even that people did. I’m glad I can remember that now.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Eddie sighs, and doesn’t add, _I didn’t have anybody other than Myra, and if I hadn’t remembered you guys I never would have left._ It’s not fair to be jealous of Bev’s friendship with Kay, not after everything she went through. He still is, anyway.

“Speaking of,” she adds. “I know you said no divorce talk—”

“And I meant it. Seriously.”

“Okay,” Bev says, and then continues anyway, relentless as always. “Just one thing, and then I’ll drop it. I was just going to ask if you needed—you’re not still staying in Queens, are you? Or did Myra move out?

“No, I did. She’s keeping the house. I’m—uh. I’m in L.A., actually.”

“Wait, really?”

“Yeah, Richie’s letting me stay at his place while I figure shit out.” He makes a face as he says it, grateful that she can’t see him. It’s not even that he’s lying, but somehow it feels like it: like this was the result of a mutual discussion instead of Eddie making a completely insane late-night impulse plane ticket purchase and Richie being unable to say no to any of his friends.

Bev doesn’t push it, mercifully. The conversation turns from there to her fledgling solo company and the new fall line they’re working on, and she promises to send him some sketches because he’s the only one of the boys who will actually appreciate them, which is probably laying it on a little thick but still warms Eddie to his core.

There are more messages for him in the group chat by the time they hang up: a row of hearts from Ben, and variations of _That’s rough, man, I’m here if you need me_ from Bill and Stan. Mike posts a photo of a starkly gorgeous desert landscape and a stanza of what Eddie assumes is poetry about peaceful solitude.

 _You’re so fucking pretentious_ , he types, _but that’s a nice pic._ Mike responds with three cry-laughing emojis followed by a middle finger, and it’s—okay. It’s okay.

Myra calls three more times that afternoon. He doesn’t answer.

* * *

And that’s how it goes, for days that stretch out into a week, and beyond. Richie’s not on tour now, and his schedule is unpredictable; there are more meetings with his new manager, a petite and terrifying woman named Jean, and voiceover work for some Pixar movie where he’s playing a neurotic pigeon, apparently.

“I’m basing so much of my character work on you, they oughta give you a film credit,” he tells Eddie seriously over takeout, and Eddie throws a samosa at his head.

He’s still technically on sabbatical from work, although he has a sneaking feeling, not yet fully articulated to himself, that he’s not going back. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s going to do instead; hanging out by Richie’s pool is nice for the time being, but it’s not a fucking future. But every time he thinks about putting on one of his suits and driving to work, standing in the cool green light as the elevator sweeps him up to his cubicle, he feels like he’s choking. So that’s something he’s going to have to deal with at some point.

At some _later_ point. For now, Richie seems genuinely happy to have him here, which surprises Eddie more than it maybe should.

He borrows Richie’s car to do the grocery shopping during the day while Richie is either working or sleeping in. It feels weirdly hedonistic, which is a term that no sane person should apply to midday Trader Joe’s runs where he finds himself muttering heated imprecations at every idiotic shopper with an oversized cart in front of him in line.

But he can buy whatever the hell he wants, and if Richie happens to be around when he brings it home, he’ll cackle delightedly over Eddie’s collection of esoteric potato chip flavors and then throw on a movie so they can sit on the floor and eat them out of the bag with greasy fingers. He lets Eddie cook, too, even though he’s not very good at it, and he’ll eat the resultant meal if it turns out even marginally edible, and on the nights where it’s not, or where neither of them is in the mood, he’ll either order takeout or drag Eddie out to what he calls the hidden L.A. hotspots, which mostly consist of a collection of greasy-spoon diners and roadside taquerias.

“You’re literally a millionaire,” Eddie tells him, baffled, when they’re eating chilaquiles at five in the morning at some roadside dive. Early-morning traffic roars by on the freeway three hundred yards away. “Don’t you ever eat at sit-down restaurants?”

“We’re sitting down right now, dude,” Richie says, indicating the sagging picnic table they’re crowded at while mayflies swarm the light overhead. Between Eddie’s toes, the earth is dry and sandy, and he’s just slightly concerned about scorpions skittering over his sandal-clad feet.

“Not what I meant,” he says.

“You want me to take you to a five-star restaurant, I’ll take you to a five-star restaurant,” Richie says, exaggeratedly casual, and Eddie nudges their knees together.

An hour ago he woke in the dark with his heart pounding and the phantom taste of blood on his tongue, and wandered out in the kitchen to find Richie already awake, wet-eyed, brewing coffee with shaky hands. Myra would have grilled him about the nightmare, but Richie just gave him a long look before nodding sharply and grabbing his keys. They still haven't talked about it. Eddie is more than fine with that. It's not like they can't both guess the contents of each other's bad dreams.

“Nah,” he says finally, dragging his fork through the mess of cream and sauce and scrambled egg on his plate. “I’m good.”

“Well, there you go,” Richie says, and nudges him back.

* * *

He goes for a run the next morning, which is something he would have cleared with his physical therapist if she weren’t still back in New York along with the wreckage of the rest of his life.

It’s fine. He’s been leaving the sling off for the past couple of days, and it’s been fine. He’s got to get back in the swing of things sooner or later

He leaves early in the morning when Richie is still sleeping, slipping out into the hazy predawn heat. Richie’s neighborhood is fairly flat, although the land rises up in the distance, rocky humps with sparse vegetation that still seem oddly artificial compared to the rolling green countryside outside of NYC. In New York, you can drive an hour outside of the city and be in the middle of nowhere; L.A. has a different kind of urban sprawl, one that encroaches for miles into the arid desert. The quality of the air is different: dry and hot even this early, scented with the aftertaste of asphalt and engine exhaust and dust.

He didn’t run outside that much in New York anyway; they had a treadmill, and even in their quiet neighborhood Myra always worried about muggers. So he’d run, and run, and run, in their antiseptically clean half-finished basement, listening to the sound of his footsteps rattling the treadmill and the distant chatter of Myra’s shows. Running like he was trying to get away from something and always winding up in the exact same place.

It’s been months since he’s done any real exercise, so he’d be out of shape even if it weren’t for the barely-healed hole through his shoulder. Still, he manages a little over a mile at an easy lope, which feels like a triumph even if he has a persistent cramp all down his left side by the end of it. He slows to a jog as he comes up on Richie’s house. The neighborhood is waking up, sunlight reaching rosy fingers in between the dark shadows that palm trees cast on the pavement. The kitchen light is on, which means Richie must finally be up. It’s early for him, but his schedule has been pretty much fucked the entire time Eddie has been here, so it's not that surprising.

He does his cooldown stretches on the front walk, getting his breathing under control, letting his heartbeat slow. He's dripping sweat and his shoulder twinges painfully every time he moves, but at least he’s no longer noticeably out of breath by the time he jogs up the steps and slips inside.

“I hope that’s you, Eds,” Richie calls, as he kicks the door shut behind him and stoops down to untie his sneakers, lining them up neatly alongside the chaotic jumble of Richie’s shoes in the hallway. “If it’s a burglar, I feel like I should warn you that I am technically an axe murderer, so—”

He breaks off as Eddie wanders into the kitchen, stripping his disgustingly sweaty t-shirt off as he goes. When he looks up, Richie is standing by the counter, coffee carafe in hand, blinking at him like he’s a visitor from outer space.

“What?” Eddie asks, abruptly self-conscious. He sort of wants to cross his arms to cover up the scar, but that would probably just call more attention to it. Anyway, it’s not like Richie doesn’t know it’s there. He practically had his hand _inside_ it back in the cave when he was trying to staunch the bleeding.

“Um,” Richie says, then coughs and shakes his head sharply, like he’s rebooting his brain, before he turns back toward the counter, fumbling for his coffee cup. “Were you _running_?”

“Yeah, so fucking what?” Eddie snaps. Then he catches himself with a grimace. Richie isn’t Myra, or his mom. Richie isn’t going to fuss at him over going for a jog while he’s still recovering, even though there’s an ache starting to settle into his shoulder that indicates he really might have overdone it this time. “Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m gonna go take a shower, I’m disgusting.”

“Cool,” Richie says, without looking back toward him. He doesn’t seem irritated, though, so much as—wary, or maybe distracted, stirring sugar into his coffee with way more focus than the task really needs. “I’ll uh. Figure out some breakfast.”

“...Okay,” Eddie says, and slings his shirt over his shoulders as he makes his way back to the bathroom.

The twinge has deepened to a sharp, unpleasant cramp by the time he climbs out of the shower and dries off. Eddie prods gingerly at the scar, feeling the damaged muscle beneath strung as tight as piano wire, then makes a face at his reflection in the mirror and shakes one of his muscle relaxants into his hand. He doesn’t like how they make him feel, but he knows from experience that if he doesn’t take one now the cramp will spread knots up and down his spine that won’t go away for days. It’s better to be woozy for a couple of hours, especially since he doesn’t actually need to do anything more strenuous than doze on Richie’s couch.

He hates this. He’s spent so much of his life being told that he was delicate and sickly and weak when there was never anything wrong with him at all. It’s infuriating that _now_ , when he’s finally free of all that shit, his body decides to keep failing him.

Rationally, he knows that’s bullshit. Rationally, he knows that he’s just healing, that he’ll keep healing, that he’ll be _fine_ , but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like a betrayal.

If he stays out here, he’ll have to find a new PT, he thinks absently. Then he pauses, turning the thought over in his head. _If_ he stays. He could do that. There’s nothing actually keeping him in New York anymore: just a house he hates, a marriage that’s in the end stages of dissolution, and a job he dreads returning to. Richie’s out here, and Bill will be once he’s done with the film shoot in England.

Eddie could look for a new job. He could find an apartment, or maybe even a house. He has savings; he’ll be fine, money-wise, and anyway he knows without asking that Richie will let him stay as long as he needs.

Will let him stay without asking for anything in return, even an explanation. Richie has always been recklessly generous like that.

Case in point: when he finally comes out, the other shower is running and Richie is nowhere to be seen, but there’s a covered plate on the table with a post-it note reading _EAT ME, EDDIE_ in Richie’s loose scrawl. Eddie feels a smile tugging at his mouth, warm and oddly embarrassed, as he thumbs at the note. His face is doing something he’s not completely in control of, and he’s glad that Richie’s not there to see it.

The plate contains a bacon and egg sandwich on a toasted bagel, still warm, greasy and perfect with cheese melted all over it. Eddie eats it slowly at the kitchen table, watching the light coming in through the stained-glass Yoda and listening to the shower running, the sound of traffic outside as the city around him wakes up.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to start thinking about the future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A very important reference: **[this](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/779000896938835979/780827688796553256/image1.png?width=1020&height=573)** is approximately what Richie looks like in _Baked Alaskans_.
> 
> I'm on [Tumblr](https://glorious-spoon.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/glorious_spoon) as glorious_spoon if you'd like to come say hi!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s got a feeling, suddenly, that he’s getting in too deep. That he’s tangled his life up with Richie’s in a way that he won’t be able to undo without damaging something important, and that thought fills him with a formless unease.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: brief mention of past homophobic bullying that both Eddie and Richie experienced. It's not a lot, but it's there.

Bill makes it back to California in time to see Richie’s band play at a Pasadena bar that’s owned by a friend of Sandy’s. It’s a charity thing for the local hospital, as Richie explains while he piles gear onto a mildly protesting Bill to load into the van—Eddie, by virtue of his still-healing shoulder, is declared exempt from the heavy lifting, and since it's about ninety-five degrees in the shade, he doesn't argue much. They must be at least tolerable to listen to, although Eddie’s pretty sure that a lot of the draw has to do with the somewhat dubious star power involved. Besides Richie, there’s another comedian whom he's definitely seen somewhere on TV—asking where would mean admitting to that, so he doesn’t—and the creator of a popular indie comic book. Sandy, who apparently plays a minor but beloved character on some Nickelodeon show, is on bass guitar and lead vocals.

The band is called Sunset Dumpster, which is apparently based on some incomprehensible in-joke that Richie can’t explain coherently and Sandy is giggling too hard to even try, kicking her feet arhythmically against the stage and passing a bottle of spiked cola back and forth with Richie while the comic book artist tunes his guitar.

It makes Eddie feel almost childishly left out, which in turn makes him very glad that Bill is there.

He looks good. Better than he did in Derry, although that’s admittedly a low fucking bar to clear; the last time they saw each other in person, Eddie was in the hospital, and Bill, like the rest of them, looked like he hasn't slept in a week. Now he's tanned and well-rested in a guayabera shirt and a neatly trimmed, gently graying beard. It gives him a dignified, professorial vibe that’s just slightly absurd because he’s Bill Denbrough, author of schlocky horror novels with infamously weird sex scenes, and also because he’s Big Bill, whom Eddie once watched ride his bike off the end of a dock because Bev dared him to.

His wife is nowhere to be seen, but he’s wearing his wedding ring, thumbing at it absently while it as he orders his drink.

“No Audra?” Eddie asks, nodding toward it as they make their way to a table.

Bill winces slightly, then laughs. “No, she’s back in England doing reshoots. It’s fine.”

 _I didn’t say it wasn’t_ , Eddie thinks, but he doesn’t say that, and he also doesn’t say anything about the freshly-divorced branch of the Losers Club accepting new members, although from the dry sidelong look Bill gives him he’s not doing a very good job of keeping his thoughts off of his face.

“Ah,” he says instead.

Bill rolls his eyes, but lets it go. “What about you? How have you been? You haven’t tried to drown Richie in the pool yet?”

“I was married for twelve years, dude. I know how to fucking cohabit with someone.”

Bill puts up his hands, laughing. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Yeah, well, don’t start,” Eddie grumbles, settling into his chair and taking a sip of his gin gimlet. It’s too weak, and the condensation gives the glass a faintly greasy feeling. He sets it back down.

There’s a low stage on the far side of the room—nothing fancy, but high enough that the band can be seen across the bar. Richie is already behind the drum set, absently twirling a stick between his long fingers and nodding while he talks to the comic book artist, a quiet man Eddie thinks is named Will. He looks calm and relaxed, even though the place is pretty crowded.

Which—of course he does. Richie regularly gets up behind the mic in front of crowds ten times this size. Of course he’s not going to get stage fright.

He never has. Eddie remembers him climbing on a table in the middle school cafeteria to do a loud, rambling, and remarkably obscene bit that he probably found on one of his dad’s VHS comedy tapes. He took a bow afterward, to uproarious laughter, and took the detentions that followed with good grace.

Richie has always been fearless in a way that baffles Eddie, who freaked out and hid in a bathroom stall the one and only time his college roommate tried to drag him onstage for karaoke.

“So how much do they suck, do you think?” he asks Bill, dragging his attention away from the stage.

“They’re not bad. Richie dragged me and Audra to one of their sets a couple of months ago.”

A couple of months ago, Eddie was in New York, gritting his teeth through physical therapy appointments and making thin excuses to sleep in the guest bedroom of his own house. “I wish I could have been there.”

“Well,” Bill says. “You’re here now.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. He fiddles with his glass, spinning it to make little overlapping circles of condensation on the bar napkin. “I’m thinking of staying, actually.”

Bill’s eyebrows lift, but he looks at least as pleased as he is surprised. “Seriously? In California?”

“Yeah. I think… man, I just really fucking hate my job, and Myra’s keeping the house anyway, and—”

“—and it’s about as far as you can get from Derry,” Bill finishes in the knowing tones of someone who’s definitely already made that calculation for himself. Eddie wonders if that was part of it for Richie, too, even if he couldn’t remember at the time.

“Well, yeah. And you guys are out here.”

“Yeah.” Bill bumps his shoulder. “Hey. I’m happy for you.”

“I mean, I haven’t really started seriously looking.” He hasn’t actually told anyone else, either, including Richie; hasn’t found a way to work it into conversation that doesn’t sound mortifyingly needy. Maybe that’s why he’s telling Bill now; if he puts it out there, then he’ll _have_ to tell Richie. “I don’t know. I’ll probably take one look at the real estate prices out here and have a fucking aneurysm on the spot.”

“It is a mess,” Bill agrees. “Look, I can put you in touch with my agent, if you want. If you’re staying in the L.A. area, I mean. She was great when Audra and I were looking for a place.”

“I’m pretty sure your place is out of my price range,” Eddie says dryly. He hasn’t actually _been_ to the very modern mansion in Hollywood Hills, but he’s seen pictures. Richie’s comfortably-sized ranch house could probably fit in a single wing with room left over.

“That’s not,” Bill rubs the back of his neck, looking embarrassed. “I mean. That’s mostly Audra, not me.”

“Yeah, I hear movie deals don’t pay shit these days,” Eddie says, just to jab at him a little, then relents. “Yeah, okay. Thanks, man.”

“Anytime,” Bill says, and then the lights are going down and the announcer is somehow managing to say the band’s name with a straight face, and they both turn their attention toward the stage.

Sandy’s boyfriend joins them at their table a few minutes later. He’s a lanky, tanned, aging surfer named Dave, and he has a lot to say about Prop 64 and the effects it'll have on his business model. Somewhat more surprisingly, _Bill_ apparently also has plenty of opinions on the topic, and they end up in a rambling conversation about marijuana cultivation that Eddie drops out of eventually to watch the band play.

It’s pretty chill: mostly covers of classic rock standards, with a handful of newer songs thrown in. Sandy has a nice voice, low and sweet and slightly raspy on the higher notes; it wouldn’t win any awards but it works for this kind of music, in this kind of venue. Richie is laying down a steady rhythm, bobbing his head along to the beat like he does when there’s music playing in the car; Eddie thinks he might have his eyes closed, although it’s hard to tell from this angle, with his glasses in the way.

It’s… nice, actually, just being out like this, in a crowd, around other people. This doesn’t feel at all like the work mixers that have made up the vast majority of his experiences at bars, where the options were painful sobriety or mortifying drunkenness and the company was so execrable that Eddie tended to spend the whole time fantasizing about the moment he could escape to go watch late-night infomercials on his couch.

They break halfway through the set, and Richie and Sandy join them at the table; Sandy to slip onto Dave’s lap while he steadies her with an absent hand on her hip and leans in to nuzzle her throat; Richie to chug a bottle of water, flip the empty container at Eddie’s head, and rib Bill about his latest vanity project.

“It’s n-not a vanity project!” Bill protests, laughing. “My publisher pitched the idea, okay—”

“Back me up here, Eds,” Richie says. “Do you or do you not think it’s morbid as fuck to publish a fictionalized account of gruesome murders that we actually personally witnessed? Emphasis on the _fictionalized_ part, unless he’s planning on going all in on the cannibal demon clown bit.”

“Leave me the fuck out of it,” Eddie says, flipping the bottle back at him and glancing over at Dave and Sandy, who fortunately seem too wrapped up in each other to pay much attention to any mention of demon clowns. They’re sweet together. He wonders if it bothers Richie to watch. He doesn’t _seem_ bothered, but it's always hard to tell with him.

“I’m just saying, if anybody should be making bank on our collective trauma, it’s me. I’m the asshole comedian, okay—”

“Nobody’s stopping you,” Bill tells him, unimpressed but smiling. On the far side of the table, Sandy slides off Dave’s lap and leans down to give him a lingering kiss before heading back to the stage. “Get the fuck out of here, Trashmouth, your set’s starting.”

“Missed you, Big Bill,” Richie says, blowing him a kiss and ruffling Eddie’s hair as he slides out of his seat and follows after Sandy.

Bill gets a call halfway through the second set and has to head out; he texts Richie, who will doubtless give him endless amounts of shit once he’s off stage and actually checks his messages, then hugs Eddie tight.

“Hey, I’m really glad you’re sticking around,” he says, very sincerely.

“Yeah, yeah,” Eddie grumbles, but he squeezes back just as hard. He’s out of practice at being hugged like this, with nothing more than simple affection behind it, but he thinks he could get used to it.

After the set is over he tracks Richie down in the tiny backstage area, sitting on an abandoned piano stool, chatting easily with Will the comic book artist. Eddie lingers in the door for a moment, unseen; it feels like he’s getting away with something, watching Richie like this when he doesn’t know he’s being watched, in much the same way it feels like getting away with something to watch clips of his acting or comedy bits on Youtube.

The bar manager comes in through the other door with Sandy and Dave, and Richie grins at him, reaching up to slap his hand.

“—good having you guys here, every time. I really appreciate it.”

“Hey, always good to be here, man,” Richie says, and Will makes a noise of agreement as he packs his guitar away.

“Anyway, we’re gonna get going,” Sandy starts, and Richie groans.

“Come on, you’re not even gonna hang out for free drinks?”

“Baby, I am getting way too damn old for that shit.”

“Aren’t we all,” Richie sighs dramatically, half-rising out of his seat to hug her. He exchanges a back-slapping bro-hug with Dave, too, and then they make their way out through the back, arm-in-arm. Richie watches them for a moment with an expression that Eddie can only define as _wistful_ , then finally looks back toward the door. “Eddie! I was wondering if you ditched me too.”

“How the fuck would I do that?” Eddie retorts. “You’re my ride.”

“And _what_ a ride,” Richie says, waggling his eyebrows.

“Okay, you know what? Fuck you.”

“Sorry, man, you walked right into that one.”

Will is looking back and forth between them with a baffled, mildly amused look on his face. For some reason, it makes Eddie flush. He clears his throat. “Hey, you ready to get going? Or did you want to stick around for a little while?”

“I’m heading back home,” Will offers when Richie glances at him.

“You’re all so fucking boring,” Richie sighs, but he unfolds out of his chair with a grin, offering a hand to Will to slap. “See you around, man. Guess I’ll get the princess home before he turns into a pumpkin.”

“There’s so much fucking wrong with what you just said,” Eddie tells him. “You sure you don’t want to stick around for a little while?”

“Nah, there’s beer at home.” Richie slings an arm over his shoulders. He’s sweaty and too warm, and Eddie elbows him in the side in protest but doesn’t bother to pull away.

* * *

Back at the house, Richie ducks into the shower while Eddie wanders through the darkened rooms, picking things up and putting them back down, oddly unsettled. Finally, he heads out to the patio and sinks cross-legged in one of the lounge chairs, rolling a beer between his hands without drinking it, staring out at the reflections that the lights make on the rippling water. There’s a party going on somewhere down the street, the sound of music and laughter and the faint smoky smell of barbeque, but it’s muffled by distance and the tall fence that cuts Richie’s backyard off from the neighbors. He claims he only had it put up so he could skinny-dip in the pool without getting the cops called on him, although Eddie thinks that he’d still probably be visible from the upper stories of the neighboring houses. It’s not like he actually does it, anyway. Not with Eddie around, at least.

Richie finds him out there a little while later, padding out in pajama pants and a worn Depeche Mode concert t-shirt, two beers dangling from his fingers.

“Already got one,” Eddie says, lifting it.

“More for me,” Richie says easily, settling into the other chair and flopping backward with a groan. He rolls his shoulders against the backrest and then pops the lid off against the metal edge of the arm. It skitters away across the patio to disappear into the darkness, where one or the other of them will probably find it with their bare feet tomorrow. Eddie doesn’t bother to bitch at him.

“Depends how fast I can drink mine,” he retorts, and takes a long swig.

“Eds, you are looking at the reigning shotgun champion of the freshman dorm, don’t try me.”

“What, was that in the three weeks before you dropped out?”

“Three months, please,” Richie says, unoffended. “I made it most of the way through my first semester.”

“Your parents must have been so proud.”

“Oh, yeah. Poor Went and Maggie. I thought I was gonna get disowned and kicked out over Christmas. Have to scam my way into somebody else’s holiday like some fucking Lifetime movie.” Eddie winces, and Richie laughs. “I’m kidding, dude. They were pissed, though. Especially when I told them I was moving to L.A. to become an actor. Went got me a fuckin’ phone card so I could call for a ride when I came crawling back to Chicago with my tail between my legs. It’s been twenty-two years and I think he’s still waiting for that call.”

“Jesus,” Eddie sighs.

“I know. Irresponsible as shit.”

“No. Or, I mean, yeah, but—” He shrugs. “I wish I had done some irresponsible shit when I was young. Feels like it’s too late now, you know?”

“The hangovers sure as hell last longer.”

“Yeah.” He glances over again. Richie is gazing out over the water with a soft, distant look that reminds Eddie oddly of how he was looking at Sandy and Dave earlier. Wistful, almost. Eddie reaches out to nudge his knee with his foot. “Hey, you guys really kicked ass tonight, you know that?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Who ever thought that fuckin’ garage band you and—who was it, Ben and Stan?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Richie says. “Fuckin’ Christ, we were so bad. Lucky Ben’s mom was never home to hear us practice.”

“You’ve improved a lot.”

“Not like it takes a lot of skill to hit things with a stick,” Richie says, but he looks pleased. “Besides, Sandy’s a hell of a lot better singer than Ben was.”

“A drunken seagull would be a better singer than Ben.”

“Okay, fair. But still.”

“Yeah, she was really good.” Eddie takes another swallow of beer. “Why’d you two break up, anyway?”

“Me and Sandy?” Richie asks, sounding startled.

“Yeah, you seem—I don’t know. Close.”

“Yeah,” Richie says, sitting up. He looks slightly tense. “We are. She’s like—she’s my best friend, other than you guys.”

Unspoken, Eddie hears: _she was around when none of you were._ It’s not like it’s his fault, but something in him twinges guiltily anyway.

“Sorry,” he adds belatedly. “If it’s a sore subject.”

“Nah, it wasn’t dramatic or anything, it was just…” Richie trails off, then laughs, sounding more relaxed. “Okay, it was dramatic as shit, but it wasn’t really anybody’s fault. Just like, being in our twenties, fucking around and fucking up. You know?”

Eddie picks at the label of his beer bottle. He spent most of his twenties in college, then grad school, then living in the tiny second bedroom of his mother’s stifling Long Island condo while the cancer slowly ate her alive. He met Myra when he was twenty-eight, six months after the funeral. Everything with her seemed so… comfortable. In a way that makes him cringe in retrospect at how obvious it all should have been.

He didn’t go to a single party in college, which seems like an absurd thing to regret now, on the far side of forty, but there it is. The label on his bottle peels away in a long strip, the gummy side sticking to his fingernails before he shakes it off.

“Not really,” he says finally, and tilts his head back to swallow the last of his beer.

“...Oh,” Richie says, and it’s horribly, gently knowing. Eddie glares up at him, ready to fire back, and he grins, wide and goofy, spreads his hands, and says, “That’s cool, man. I never really grew the fuck up to start with and you’re just about on schedule for a mid-life crisis, right?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Eddie snaps, inexplicably relieved. “Hey, give me that other beer.”

“Nah, a mid-life crisis calls for whiskey,” Richie says, heaving himself out of his chair. He stretches, his back cracking as he twists his shoulders, and Eddie watches him. The lights from the pool reflect off of his glasses, and his stubble has grown in enough to sharpen the angle of his jaw, the collar of his shirt a curving dark line against his pale throat. He seems in that moment to be cut out of silhouette pieces, a puzzle of a man, and Eddie finds himself staring for longer than he should.

Long enough that Richie turns to look at him, raising his eyebrows. “You good, Eds?”

“Great,” Eddie mutters, and looks away.

Richie gets a bottle of whiskey from the house. He does not get any glasses, and he looks at Eddie like he’s insane when he asks for one. “This is mid-life crisis drinking. We’re doing this the right way, and since I don’t have any red Solo cups, that means straight out of the bottle. Unless you wanna skip straight to body shots.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, give me that,” Eddie sighs. The whiskey is way too good to drink directly from the bottle, but he does it anyway, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and then wipes the mouth of the bottle with the hem of his shirt before he hands it back to Richie.

“You’re not even gonna share your oral herpes with me on this special occasion? I’m hurt.”

“Beep beep, fuckhead.”

Richie’s grin squints up the corners of his eyes. He tilts his head back to drink; Eddie watches his throat work as he swallows, then looks away.

He spends a lot of his life, it suddenly occurs to him, looking away.

Richie hands the bottle back, and Eddie takes another drink, feeling the whiskey settle warmly in his stomach. “Hey, Rich.”

“Yeah?”

“Why’d you and Sandy break up, really?”

Richie rubs a hand through his damp hair and gives him a sidelong look. “I fuckin’ love that you think there’s a story there.”

“There’s always a story there with you.”

“That’s just editorializing,” Richie says. He tilts his head back, pinches the bridge of his nose, and says, “We wanted different things, okay, it’s really not that deep. And I was like—such an asshole to her, seriously.”

“You?” Eddie asks, trying to smile.

Richie laughs, but there’s something awkward about it. “Hard to believe, right?”

“Was it the kid thing?”

“Huh?”

“The…” he trails off. He has a sense that he’s poking at something that he shouldn’t. They don’t really do this, him and Richie; so much of their friendship is built around things that neither of them brought up to the surface, but right now Eddie is tired and weirdly unsettled and more than a little drunk, and just for fucking once, he wants to push. “The kid thing. Myra and I—she always wanted kids. I mean, we never really… It never happened, anyway.”

“For any of us,” Richie says. His fingers rattle on his knee. “Apparently.”

“Yeah,” Eddie mutters, and takes another drink. He knows that Stan and Patty were trying. He doesn’t know for sure about Bill or Bev. He’s almost completely sure that Richie, like him, never really wanted kids in the first place. “So was that it? With Sandy?”

Richie hesitates, then reaches across the space between them to retrieve the bottle. Eddie watches him take a long drink, then set it down. He’s looking out across the pool, his profile drawn sharp. His jaw works like he’s rolling something around in his mouth, testing the shape of it, then he finally sighs. “Yeah, partly. The gay thing was a bigger problem, though.”

He breathes out slowly after he says it, and doesn’t look over at Eddie.

“Oh,” Eddie says, a soft exhalation that he hopes doesn’t come out too startled. He feels like he’s been knocked off-balance, but he doesn’t want Richie to see him stumble. Not over this.

Richie still isn’t looking at him. Eddie hesitates, then shuffles his chair closer until he can put a hand on Richie’s shoulder. He’s warm and tense under his t-shirt, and Eddie jostles him gently, like he can rattle some of the tension out of him by force.

“I’m sorry,” he says seriously. “I’m an asshole.”

Richie laughs, ducking his head, relaxing a little under Eddie’s hand. “Yeah, but it works on you.”

“And, uh. Thank you. For telling me.”

“Please don’t be sincere, I’ll cry or puke, or cry _and_ puke, and nobody wants to deal with that.”

“Fine,” Eddie says, letting go of Richie to steal the whiskey back. “Dickface.”

“There you go,” Richie says, with a quick grin that doesn’t _seem_ forced. “Besides, this is supposed to be your mid-life crisis, not mine.”

“We can share.” Eddie licks the taste of whiskey from his lips and hands the bottle back, only fumbling a little bit before Richie catches it. He’s just sober enough to be aware that he’s going to hate his entire life tomorrow morning, but tomorrow morning seems very far away.

In the other chair, Richie relaxes back, head tilted, long legs spread. He was always like that as a kid—he could never get the hang of sitting in furniture correctly, always had to have his arms and legs everywhere, draped like a cat over chairs and couches and that fucking hammock that he always liked to hog. Even before he hit his growth spurt, he always seemed to take up so much space. Now there’s a solidity to him, a presence granted by his age and height, but that lazy sprawl is just the same.

“Did you,” Eddie starts to ask, then stops.

Richie rolls his head over to look at him. “Did I…?”

“Sorry,” Eddie says. His tongue feels heavy, his skin warm. He’s not smashed, but he’s on his way there. Close enough to it that keeping his thoughts behind his teeth is proving difficult. “None of my business, forget it.”

“Now I’m curious,” Richie says, struggling upright. “What is it?”

“Just—Sandy. Did you love her?”

Richie is silent for a moment, then he shrugs a little with one shoulder. “Yeah. Yeah, I did. I still do, just not… she was my best friend, but it wasn’t… not like she deserved. I mean, obviously.”

“Yeah,” Eddie sighs, contemplating the lights reflected on the pool, swimming and separating on the rippling surface. He doesn’t ask if there was anyone else in those years. Any guy that Richie loved. He’s not sure he wants to know the answer to that. “I don’t think I ever loved Myra. Not really. Isn’t that fucked up?”

“Eds,” Richie says gently.

“I guess I just told myself that was what marriage was like, you know? I got so drunk at my own wedding. I kept expecting something to happen, to… to interrupt it, make it stop for me, but nothing did, and it was like this fuckin’—like a conveyer belt, or a—an escalator that I couldn’t get off of. The job and the wife and the house in the suburbs, and now I’m forty-one years old and I just. Wasted half of my life.”

“Yeah,” Richie sighs. It’s knowing, because of course it is. Richie is one of the few people who really does know. “Fuckin’ clown.”

“Fuckin’ clown,” Eddie agrees.

“I’m sorry. You should have had somebody who was good to you.”

“She’s not like—it wasn’t all bad. It would have been easier if it was all bad, you know?”

“Yeah,” Richie says softly.

“I wanted it to be all her fault, but it wasn’t. We were just bad for each other. Bad _to_ each other. I think I fucked up her life, too, and that’s—how do you even apologize for that?”

“I don’t think you can,” Richie says after a long silence. He’s spinning the whiskey bottle between his hands, looking out across the pool like he’s seeing something a lot more meaningful than the fence separating their back yard from the neighbors. “I think you just have to keep moving forward, man. Live your life, let her live hers.”

Eddie finds himself perversely glad that Richie isn’t trying to tell him that it’s not his fault. He already knows that. It doesn’t really help, with the memory of Myra’s tired, wounded face in their kitchen the day he finally asked for a divorce. The weeks of carefully, meticulously tearing apart the stifled little life they built together before the silent hotel room and the endless phone calls drove him onto a reckless cross-country flight.

She hasn’t called in over a week. Maybe she’s finally starting to let go, too. It’s something his mother never managed, and Eddie knows perfectly well what it means that Myra is always inextricably linked to her in his thoughts.

She deserved better than that. They both did. But Richie’s right: he can’t keep making it his responsibility. If nothing else, he’s lost that right by now.

“When did you get so fuckin’ wise, anyway?”

Richie snorts and drinks again. “Don’t worry, I’m all out of profound thoughts for the evening.”

“Thank fuck,” Eddie says, and leans into him to tug the bottle out of his hands. Richie fights him on it, but not hard, and he subsides when Eddie digs an elbow into his side. Triumphant, Eddie takes such a big gulp of whiskey that he almost chokes on it. He swallows hurriedly, his eyes watering, throat burning, a dribble of liquor spilling over his chin. “Jesus, _ow._ ”

He wipes his face, licks his lips, and offers the bottle back to Richie.

“Nah, I’m done,” Richie says. His eyes flicker toward Eddie’s face, then away. His expression is hard to read. “It’s all you, Eduardo.”

“I should probably drink some water and go to bed,” Eddie says.

He’s half-expecting Richie to argue—half-wants him to—but Richie doesn’t. He heaves himself to his feet, sways a little before steadying, then reaches down to offer Eddie a hand up too. He starts to pull away afterward, and Eddie slings an arm over his stupidly broad shoulders before he can manage it, and together they stumble back into the house.

* * *

He wakes up way earlier than he wants to the following morning, head pounding, mouth dry and sour. It takes him several minutes to peel himself out of bed, and when he makes his way out into the quiet house early sunlight is just starting to slip through the blinds. Through the sliding glass doors to the patio, he can see the whiskey bottle they abandoned there last night, still uncapped next to Richie’s chair. Richie is nowhere to be seen, which isn’t surprising given that the novelty clock on the wall tells him that it’s just past five in the morning. Eddie pours himself a glass of water and drinks it slowly at the kitchen sink, hoping that the buzzy hungover adrenaline from the dream he can’t remember will fade enough to let him get back to sleep.

By the time he’s finished it, he feels more awake than ever. He groans, rubbing a hand over his face, and goes back down the hall toward the bedrooms. As he passes Richie’s closed door, he can hear heavy slow breathing—not quite snores, but not far off it either. Richie is usually a surprisingly quiet sleeper, but they both overdid it a little on the booze last night.

For a moment, Eddie imagines pushing the door open and slipping inside to the twilight gloom of Richie’s bedroom. Settling on the bed next to him and resting a hand on his sleep-warm skin. They used to share beds all the time when they were little, until adolescence reared its head and they started asserting their personal space.

Or Richie did, anyway. Eddie remembers that. He never gave a second thought to climbing on top of Richie, shoving into his space in the hammock or the couch or on one of their beds, but sometime around eighth grade Richie started getting prickly about it.

In retrospect, he can guess why. He never paid much mind to the ugly rumors that circled around Richie—the slurs scratched into his locker and scribbled on the bathroom walls—and it wasn’t like nobody ever called Eddie a faggot for being small and skinny and meticulous about his personal hygiene, but even though Richie always turned it into a joke, it clearly cut deeper for him.

Eddie curls his fingers against the door, feeling a surge of protective anger for that long-ago awkward teenager with floppy hair and thick glasses. There’s something warm about it, and terrible, and Eddie doesn’t know what to do with it. Richie has never been very good at letting people look out for him, and anyway it’s not like Eddie can travel back in time and beat up everybody who put that sad, wary look on his face.

He pulls away from the door before he can do something stupid. He goes to change into running shorts and pull his sneakers on, since sleep is clearly not on the table now, and slips out the front door into the predawn heat.

He’s been doing a little better at taking it easy on his runs: slowing down when a stitch starts coming on instead of powering through the pain, and on this particular morning his head is still throbbing and his stomach is unsteady and he ends up walking more than he jogs. It still feels good to be outside and moving. By the time he makes it back to the house, he feels a little less like a corpse pickled in stale whiskey.

He retrieves clean clothes from his room—the room that he’s come to think of as his, with its sunflower-yellow walls and mismatched blankets and Richie’s drum-set still perched on the floor at the foot of the bed, where Eddie inevitably trips over on his way out the door every single day. There’s a bent shade that lets in a stripe of light across his pillow. At some point in the past month and change, his clothes have migrated into the dresser, and his suitcases are all stacked in the hallway closet along with several bags of clothes for donation and a set of golf clubs that probably haven’t been used since the Bush administration.

He’s got a feeling, suddenly, that he’s getting in too deep. That he’s tangled his life up with Richie’s in a way that he won’t be able to undo without damaging something important, and that thought fills him with a formless unease.

In the kitchen after his shower, he fiddles around with the coffee maker until he gets a pot brewing, and he’s contemplating the contents of the fridge when Richie finally shuffles out, bleary-eyed and scruffy with his hair all over the place. He pauses in the doorway, half-covering his yawn, then squints at Eddie. “Did you make coffee?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “It might be terrible, sorry.”

Richie blinks at him again, then offers him a sleepy smile. “I’m not that picky.”

“Well, good,” Eddie says, letting the fridge door swing shut. That sharp, warm feeling is back. He swallows it down and retrieves another glass from the cupboard—because he knows where the glasses are now, where all the dishware and utensils are stored—fills it at the sink, and hands it to Richie. “Drink that first.”

“You’re a fuckin’ lifesaver,” Richie mumbles, slouching against the counter and cradling the glass between his hands.

“Yeah, well. You were right last night.”

Richie squints at him. “I was?”

“The hangovers are worse when you’re in your forties.”

“Did you actually do enough partying when you were a kid to compare?”

“I’m extrapolating.”

Richie hums and nods and drinks his water without saying anything else. When he’s done, he moves past Eddie to put the glass in the dishwasher, and Eddie is pretty sure he’s not imagining that Richie is putting a lot more space between them than he usually would.

“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”

Richie shrugs, then gives him a sidelong look, then sighs, rubbing a hand over his jaw, and settles against the counter opposite Eddie. “Yeah. I’m just… I don’t know, man. Don’t want to make you uncomfortable, that’s all.”

“Why the fuck would I be uncomfortable?” Eddie asks blankly, before the penny drops. “Wait, you mean about the gay thing?”

Richie huffs laughter. “Yeah, I mean about the gay thing.”

“I’m not uncomfortable,” Eddie repeats firmly. He almost wants to say something more, like, _is that really what you think about me?_ or maybe, _actually, Rich, I think maybe I—_

He cuts both thoughts off. He’s pretty sure this has almost nothing to do with him, as a person, anyway.

“Okay,” Richie says, still not meeting his eyes.

“You really haven’t told many people, have you?”

“Other than, like, anonymous Grindr hookups…?” Richie grins wanly. As jokes go, it’s weak, but Eddie gives him a smile anyway. “No, not really. Sandy knows. I mean… some people have guessed, probably. You remember fuckin’ Bowers, right?”

Eddie winces, pushing his tongue against the scar on the inside of his cheek. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Richie says, and doesn’t elaborate.

He looks like he’s expecting Eddie to ask, but Eddie doesn’t. Instead, he takes a deliberate step across the kitchen and pulls Richie into a hug.

It’s awkward, because of course it is: Eddie doesn’t fucking know how to hug someone, not like this, not in a way that means something, and it doesn’t help that Richie doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. He’s not pulling away, though, so Eddie just hangs on, and eventually he settles them tentatively between Eddie’s shoulders, then grips his t-shirt like he’s holding onto a life preserver. Eddie rubs his back carefully, and Richie makes a small noise and folds against him. He’s so big, sleep-warm and soft, and when he tucks his face into Eddie’s neck and takes a shaky breath, something hot twists in the back of Eddie’s throat.

“You okay?” he asks again into the quiet space between them.

“I’m fine,” Richie mumbles. His glasses are digging into Eddie’s collarbone. “I’m not crying, shut up.”

Eddie snorts. “Okay, you’re not crying. You want breakfast?”

“Why, are you offering?” Richie asks, and lets go of Eddie to step back. He swipes at his eyes under his glasses, looking slightly sheepish. His eyelashes are clumped together, and the wet sheen of tears makes his eyes look very blue.

Eddie squashes a sudden urge to pull him back. There’s the germ of a thought taking root in him, something too bright and strange to look at right now. He touches Richie’s shoulder instead, then retreats back to the fridge. “Yeah, go sit down. Drink your coffee. I’ll make you some eggs or whatever.”

“I knew I kept you around for a reason,” Richie says, smiling lopsidedly, and goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on [Tumblr](https://glorious-spoon.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/glorious_spoon) as glorious_spoon if you'd like to come say hi!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, yeah, I'm splitting this last chapter in half because it got absurdly long. The rest of it is written, and will be edited and posted sometime this week.
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: some boundary-pushing behavior from Myra; Eddie experiences a panic attack and also has some body image issues about his scars.

Bill sends him the realtor’s information a few days later, and Eddie thanks him, and then stashes the number in his notes app and doesn’t call.

It’s not even really on purpose; he’s just got other shit on his mind. He puts out feelers among his contacts on the West Coast and starts polishing his resume. He finds himself drawn toward smaller nonprofits—the kind with utopian mission statements that would have had him rolling his eyes a few years ago. He still feels too crusty and cynical to fit in with the idealistic kids that seem to populate those places, but it would be nice to feel like he’s not actively making the world a worse place for the sake of his 401k, so he can probably adjust. It’s not like he particularly liked any of his old coworkers, either. Also, now that he doesn’t constantly dread coming home at night, 80-hour work weeks with colleagues fuelled by cocaine and blind ambition have lost a lot of their appeal. The pay is less, and it’s not cheap out here, but he can always get a roommate if he has to.

He can't bring himself to ask Richie about making their current arrangement permanent. Richie is generous to a fault, but that doesn’t mean he wants his childhood friend camping out in his spare room forever. Eventually, they’ll probably start to grate on each other; just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean that it _won’t_. Eddie has never been easy to live with, as Myra and every single roommate he’s ever had can attest. Richie might find his various neuroses entertaining now, but his tolerance is eventually bound to wear thin.

Besides, at some point Richie is probably going to want to bring a date home or something, and Eddie doesn’t want to make it awkward. That’s another thing he’s not letting himself dwell on, for reasons that he’s also not thinking about. That way leads down the rabbit hole of his marriage and everything it meant, and everything it didn’t, and Eddie doesn’t feel prepared to face any more of that than he already peeled away in front of Richie on that drunken night by the pool.

He doesn’t regret that. It seems like a fair trade for being trusted with Richie’s secret. But it’s still raw, and he’s trying to get better about picking at open wounds.

He finds a local physical therapist that takes his insurance, and tries not to worry about what’ll happen when he finally puts in notice at his job back in New York, or when they finally cut him loose; he’s running down his FMLA leave and the last of his accumulated sick time, and there’s only so much grace time he can count on after that. Even though he can hold that place accountable for at least two of the three stress ulcers he’s had in the past ten years, he can’t help but feel guilty about using up all that leave time when he has no intention of staying.

There’s a little voice in his head that sounds like Richie or Stan depending on the day, telling him that he’s a fucking moron for worrying about that when his future is on the line. That there’s more to life than work. There are lazy nights by the pool and excellent roadside taquerias and the California sunsets spilling across the ocean. There are people who care about him and want him to be happy. He's not quite sure what happiness even looks like, but he's starting to sketch out the shape of it. Trying to, anyway.

If what he comes up with looks like the the dusty mountains rising in the distance and the two poolside chairs here in Richie's backyard, well, that's something Eddie also isn't letting himself examine much. Right now he and Richie seem to be in a wary holding pattern that he doesn’t quite know how to break. They’re both treating Eddie’s presence here as just some extended vacation from reality even though it’s been more than two months now. Even though Richie is definitely capable of putting two and two together. But he hasn't asked, and Eddie hasn't said anything. It's like the calm before a summer storm, crackling and strange and ready to break at a single word.

Things have been weird between them, but it's not a bad kind of weird, or at least Eddie doesn't think so. In any case, Richie is at a studio meeting and Eddie is alone at the house when the self-addressed postcard comes in from the Queens County clerk office to notify him that the judgement on his divorce has been signed and entered.

There’s a stack of mail along with it: an electric bill, because Richie still hasn’t bothered to switch to online bill-pay, a bank statement for Richie and one from the credit union that Eddie signed up for because he doesn’t need to deal with withdrawal fees from his old bank back in New York; a catalogue advertising designer shoes and watches that Eddie can’t afford and Richie won’t wear. Eddie flips through them, the postcard with his own handwriting and a NYC address pinched between the web of his thumb and forefinger while he stands next to the mailbox on the dusty street in Southern California with a flowering cactus a few feet from his sandals, and he becomes aware, suddenly, that his heart is beating too fast, his throat constricting.

He settles his hand on the hot metal of the mailbox, the scorching heat a welcome distraction, takes a couple of deep breaths, and heads back into the cool air-conditioned house.

It’s easier there, in the dry dim space of the front hallway, to breathe. He stands just inside the door for a span of time that would be embarrassing if anyone were there to witness it, a handful of envelopes and slick catalogues clutched in his sweaty palm. Finally, he manages to relax. To kick his silty sandals off and line them up on the rack, to drop Richie’s mail and the catalog on the cluttered hallway table where he’ll get to them eventually. His own he takes into his bedroom, to leave on the low dresser beneath the window.

He’s divorced now. Officially. All those old tethers are snipped, fucking cauterized like a long-infected wound. Eddie should be elated, or at least relieved, but instead he just feels strangely unmoored, floating aimlessly through the house and completely unable to focus. He wishes Richie were home. If it weren’t three o’clock in the afternoon, he’d pour himself a drink.

He’s already gone for a run; he’s stretching out to two miles now, and the ache in his shoulder is a dim, distant shadow of the ever-present world-swallowing pain of three months ago. But it’ll still hurt if he overdoes it, and anyway he’s already had a shower and Richie will be home pretty soon so they can figure out dinner plans. Eddie wants that. He doesn’t want to worry Richie. He wants to feel fucking _normal_ , and not like his brain is trying to eat itself.

He ends up puttering around the house, straightening up restlessly. He throws a load of clothes in the washer and only realizes after he does it that there’s definitely some of Richie’s stuff there, which—it’s fine. It’s not like Richie is the sort of person who regularly wears dry-clean-only clothes, or will be upset about Eddie doing his laundry for him. He tolerates Eddie’s occasional, compulsive cleaning sprees with nothing more than good-natured ribbing, he won’t be mad about Eddie washing the grody sweatshirt that he’s had flung across the back of the couch for the past week.

Eddie rubs his hands over his arms and goes back out to the kitchen. He’s wiping down the already spotless stovetop when his phone vibrates on the counter beside him.

It’s not a number he recognizes, so he pulls a smile onto his face and tries to sound upbeat as he answers. “Edward Kaspbrak speaking.”

The thing is, he expects it to be Richie calling from the studio office to ask if they need groceries. He never fails to mercilessly roast Eddie’s phone voice, which is something Eddie could use right now. It’s also vaguely possible that it’s Stan, who has a rarely-used landline that Eddie hasn’t saved the number for. Or, for that matter, one of the three positions he’s submitted his resume to so far. It would be early for a response, but it’s not impossible.

Instead, there’s a brief silence, then a soft hitching breath. And then, “Eddie-bear?”

Eddie squeezes his eyes shut, sinking back against the counter. “Myra. I didn’t recognize the number. Why are you calling? You know the lawyers said—”

“I know, Eddie, I know,” she says. “I’m sorry. I just knew if I called from my own phone you wouldn’t answer.”

“And you didn’t think that was a fucking hint?”

There’s a sharp inhalation over the line. She always hated it when he swore. He glares at the microwave clock across from him and makes a silent promise to himself that if she says anything about it he _will_ hang up on her.

Instead, she rallies audibly and says, in the voice he’s pretty sure she uses on her pediatric patients, “How have you been doing? Have you been keeping up with your exercises?”

“I’m not talking about this with you,” Eddie says. His hands are shaking. He switches his phone from his left to his right before he can drop it, and grips the edge of the counter hard. “Why did you call?”

“Eddie, you need to keep up with it, or you’re going to end up with permanent muscle damage. What did your physical therapist say? I don’t want to pry, but—”

“ _Myra._ ”

Amazingly enough, she stops. He hears her take a breath, then say, “So, the judgement was entered this week.”

He closes his eyes again. “Yeah. I got the notification today, actually.”

“Oh. I see.”

The silence stretches out, and then he says, “Look, if that’s all—”

“No,” she interrupts hurriedly. “No, I—no, I just—you left most of your things at the house.”

He did. Besides his wallet and ID, a stack of paperwork, and the clothes currently folded neatly in a dresser in the spare bedroom of this sunlit house in Southern California, everything he’s owned in the past couple of decades is back in the townhouse in Queens.

There’s not much of it that he wants to keep, but he’s got some pictures of his dad, a shoebox full of cassettes that he’s been carting around since high school—he’s almost sure that there are mixtapes from Richie and Bev in there—some books and DVDs. A few knick-knacks that he’s fond of. Not much, honestly, to show for twelve years of his life. Right now, he’s glad of that. It makes the amputation cleaner.

“Yeah,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, okay, let me just—if you want to have my stuff moved to a storage facility, I’ll pay for it. Are you at the house now?”

“No,” Myra says. She sounds oddly small. “I’m staying with Claudia.”

Claudia is Myra’s sister, who has a lawyer husband and two kids and a McMansion in Long Island. Eddie makes a face, feeling genuinely sorry for his soon-to-be ex-wife for the first time since this conversation started. “Okay, well, when you get back—”

“Why don’t we just meet somewhere?” she says quickly. “I can box everything up, or you can come by—”

“Myra, I can’t—”

“I just think that we should at least try to be civil with each other.”

“That’s not it,” Eddie says. “I mean, yes. I agree. We should. But I’m not—I’m in California right now.”

“Oh,” she says. And then, rallying audibly, “Okay, well, when are you going to be back?”

“I’m not—Myra, I’m not coming back to New York. Okay? I just think it’s better if we both try to get some space. A clean break. I’m staying with a friend for now, but—”

“Who?” she interrupts. “We don’t know anyone in California.”

Eddie grits his teeth. “ _We_ don’t—he’s an old friend of mine, okay? Richie. Richie Tozier. You met him at the hospital, back in Derry, I don’t know if you remember.”

“I remember,” she says. Her voice sounds much colder all of a sudden. She doesn’t say anything else.

The silence stretches out for a long icy moment, and Eddie waits it out, anxiety knotting in the pit of his stomach, before it occurs to him that he actually _doesn’t_ need to stay on the line until she feels like she’s made her point, whatever point that is. “Okay, well—”

“Are you sleeping with him?” she asks abruptly.

“ _What?_ ”

“I want to know if you were sleeping with him,” she repeats, in that same flat, hard tone. “Is that why you left me?”

“I—Myra—no. _No._ I don’t even, I’m not—”

He stops before he can say it. _I’m not gay._ Even in his head, it sounds defensive. Defensive, and dishonest.

He swallows, then swallows again, and presses the fingers of his left hand to his right wrist, his pulse speeding beside the wire-tight ridge of his tendon. He feels skinless, standing here in the sunlit kitchen with his bare feet on the cool tile floor and the quiet slosh of the washing machine from two rooms away.

It’s not the best moment in the world for this particular revelation. He feels a little like someone just threw a drink in his face. That’s not something that’s ever actually happened to him, but he imagines it would feel a lot like this: dumbstruck and cold, too shocked to speak. All that’s missing is a cocktail olive sliding greasily into his collar.

He thinks disjointedly that Richie has probably had people throw drinks at him. He should ask what it’s like. Richie would probably have a ready joke about it.

Myra is speaking again. “Don’t you lie to me, Eddie.”

“I—I don’t—” he pauses, forces himself to take a breath that seems like it’s coming in through a narrow straw. He’s lost the pulse in his wrist, but that’s probably because his other hand is shaking too hard to maintain steady pressure. “I’m not lying. I would never—I never cheated on you. That’s not why I left, Marty.”

“Don’t call me that,” she snaps. “You don’t get to call me that anymore. Anyway—fine, whatever, don’t tell me. It doesn’t matter now. But don’t treat me like I’m stupid. I saw how you two were at the hospital. I should have known then.”

“Myra. _Myra_ , I don’t think you’re stupid. I never—” he breaks off, breathes out hard, then in again. Realizes, in a dim, belated way, that he doesn’t actually have to stay on the line, making excuses for transgressions he hasn’t actually committed to a woman he’s no longer married to. “Look, I’ll get in touch with you to make arrangements for the storage facility. I have to go.”

“Eddie—”

He hangs up.

The phone starts ringing again almost immediately, and he drops it on the counter with a clatter like he’s holding a poisonous snake. His hands are shaking, adrenaline making his blood thin and hot. It seems so hot inside all of a sudden, even with the air conditioner running, and the sound of the washing machine as it starts its spin cycle is jarringly loud, and Eddie becomes aware that his legs are wobbling a moment before they give out on him completely. He slides down to the floor and puts his head between his knees. On the counter, his phone goes to voicemail, then immediately starts ringing again. He reaches up, fumbling with numb fingers, too clumsy to hit the ignore button; after the third time he misses it, it slips out of his hand to go skittering across the floor to hit the cabinet on the far side with an ominous _crack._

“Fuck,” Eddie mumbles, knocking his head back against the cabinets, hard. The pain helps sometimes—a sharp shock to his system—but not now. Now there’s a squeezing band crushing his ribs, and it doesn’t _matter_ that he knows it’s all in his head, it feels like all of the air has been sucked out of the room. Like he’s going to die gasping like a beached fish here on the kitchen floor.

Black spots crowd his vision, his pulse galloping so hard that the sound of it fills his ears, drowning out everything else.

No—that’s not his heartbeat. That’s footsteps. Footsteps, and a voice, blurred like it’s coming through water.

Richie. _Fuck._

He tries to get his feet under him and fails. He knocks his head back against the cabinets again, watery pain rocking through his skull, and then Richie drops to the floor next to him, a dark shadow against the light coming in through the window on the far side of the room. When Eddie tries to knock his head back this time, the landing is cushioned by a large warm hand.

Richie is speaking, but he can’t make out the words over the roaring in his ears. He’s pretty sure it contains his name, along with several variations on the word _fuck._ His hand is still curved around the back of Eddie’s head. He’s close enough to touch, so Eddie does, scrabbling at the front of his shirt and clinging tight, helpless, _pathetic_.

“Eddie, Eddie, okay,” he hears. It’s calmer than he expected somehow. Richie releases the back of his head, and Eddie forces himself not to slam it back against the cabinet again. He clings tighter to Richie’s shirt, twisting his fingers in the warm fabric.

His breath is too loud, ragged whooping gasps. He wants his inhaler like he hasn’t since Derry.

_It’s a panic attack, it’s just a fucking panic attack, you can breathe, get yourself under control—_

“Okay, okay,” Richie says. He shifts slightly, steadying himself, but doesn’t move away. His hands settle over Eddie’s, urging them to flatten. “Okay, Eds. Breathe with me, okay? In… and out. In… and out.”

His chest rises and falls slowly under Eddie’s palms, a steady, deliberate rhythm accompanied by his soft voice. Eddie tries to match it and fails, then tries again. Fails again. It takes several attempts before he can gasp in a full breath, and it comes out all at once in a messy sigh.

“Good,” Richie says. It’s still so gentle. “There you go, just like that. Can you do that again?”

Eddie drags in another breath, then lets it out. Then another, and then he finally manages, “Don’t fucking baby-talk me. Asshole.”

“There he is,” Richie says, a smile audible in his voice. Eddie blinks at him, and only then realizes that his eyes are watering humiliatingly. His hands are still resting on Richie’s chest, Richie’s hands still holding them there. His skin feels like ice; Richie seems very warm in comparison. His hands are big enough to cover Eddie’s up entirely.

He’s in an awkward crouch on the floor in front of Eddie. His face is very close, very deliberately calm, but his eyes are wide.

“You good, Eds?”

“Yeah,” Eddie manages. His chest aches, a sharp cramp winding across his shoulder and down his spine. He takes another deep breath, and lets it out, and finally lets his hands slip away from Richie’s chest. Richie lets them go, then drops onto the floor and settles against the cabinets next to Eddie.

He tilts his head back and doesn’t say anything, and out of the corner of his eye, Eddie just looks at him: his messy hair and the angle of his jaw; his shirt, which is light blue and patterned with tiny red umbrellas, the sleeves baring pale, freckled arms. His cargo shorts and hairy legs and bare feet splayed on the floor.

He doesn’t look any different than usual. He just looks like Richie.

The thing is, Eddie isn’t actually that clear on most of what happened immediately after he got stabbed. He has a vague, confused memory of being piled into the backseat of Mike’s car, the sunlit Derry streets whipping by outside the windows while Richie held him half in his lap, babbling random nonsense interspersed with apologies, his hands pressing the wadded-up jacket firmly into the gaping hole in Eddie’s shoulder. Blood everywhere and a high cold ringing in his ears. It’s not something he likes to revisit, and for most of the week afterward, he was too drugged and out of it to have much of a clue what was going on. He knows that Richie was _there_ —they all were; none of them left until Eddie was in stable condition.

But Eddie was groggy and combative; Richie quiet and uncharacteristically agreeable. They barely touched. Eddie has a bleary and humiliating memory of threatening to bite Richie’s fingers the one and only time he tried to help him eat.

He doesn’t know what the hell Myra saw in the handful of times she was around both of them to bring her to a conclusion that was both so wrong and so entirely correct. It makes him feel horribly exposed, like if Richie glances over at him now he’ll see how much Eddie wants to just crawl on top of him and press down close enough to delete every inch of space between them.

That isn’t even new. What is new is the conscious awareness that he’s wondering what it would feel like if they kissed.

He heaves in another breath, rubs his knuckles over his chest, and lets his head fall back against the cabinet, then swipes at his eyes with one shaking hand. “ _Fuck._ ”

He feels as much as hears Richie turn to look at him. Before he can ask, Eddie jerks his chin at the far side of the kitchen. “My fucking phone. Probably broke it—”

Richie shifts again, then leans over to snag the phone from under the far cabinet. He fiddles with the buttons for a moment, and makes a satisfied noise when the screen lights up. “It’s fine.”

“Great,” Eddie mumbles, and drops his face into his hands, grinding the heels of his palms into his eye sockets before holding one hand out. “Give it to me. Please.”

Richie snorts, probably at the belated nicety, then drops the phone into his hand without protest. There are three missed calls and two voicemails in the notifications. He deletes them without listening, then goes into his settings to block both Myra’s number and the one she just called him from, which was probably the landline at Claudia’s house. He’s aware of Richie watching him, but he doesn’t look up until he’s done and he feels like his face is more or less under control.

“Myra,” he says, as if that’s enough of an explanation for why Richie just came home to find him having a fucking panic attack on the kitchen floor.

“Oh,” Richie says softly. His face twitches briefly into an expression that Eddie can’t read, and then he says, “You want to talk about it?”

For one insane moment, Eddie considers saying, _Yeah, actually, she thinks we’re sleeping together. Any idea why?_

He doesn’t. He’s not sure if Richie will laugh at him or not; he’s not sure which option would be worse, not when he’s on the floor feeling as squeezed out and limp as a wet rag and Richie is just _there_ , big and warm and inexcusably present.

“No,” he says finally. “No, just… I should have blocked her number a long time ago.”

“I won’t say I told you so,” Richie tells him, with a faint edge of humor.

“Oh fuck you.” He rubs his knuckles over his chest again, trying to soothe the ache there. This part is almost worse than the panic attack itself—the lingering soreness and the dissipating adrenaline that leaves him jittery and tense, like he’s been electrocuted. “Did you have a dinner plan?”

“Yeah, there’s this new sushi place I was thinking about trying,” Richie starts, then pauses, and offers, with a lopsided smile. “But I think they do delivery, if you’re more in the mood for eating in.”

Part of Eddie is mortified to be so obvious, but the rest of him is just… glad. “Yeah. Yeah, okay, let’s do that.”

* * *

He keeps turning it over and over in his head in the days that follow: when Richie cooks him dinner or drags Eddie out to some cheesy tourist attraction that he has definitely lived in L.A. too long to get so excited about, when they watch movies on the couch and fling popcorn at each other and trash-talk the plot so much that half the time they don’t notice until the credits come on.

They go to the beach one lazy Wednesday afternoon when it’s slightly less crowded than usual. Richie wears garishly patterned swim trunks and a loose Hawaiian shirt that clashes horribly with them, and Eddie finds himself staring when he pulls it off to smear himself with sunscreen. Richie is pale under his clothes, even after all this time in California, and Eddie remembers that—the way he always had a tendency to freckle and burn instead of tanning like Eddie did in the summer. He’s a lot bigger now, though: soft, but in a solid way that hints at muscle underneath. He twists with surprising limberness to spread sunscreen across his own back and shoulders, then starts on his front.

“You’re going to look like a greased orangutan by the time you’re done,” Eddie says, deliberately turning his attention back to laying the towels out evenly on the hot sand. Richie throws his head back and laughs, sunlight reflecting on his glasses.

“We both know you’re just jealous, dude.” He shakes the sunscreen in Eddie’s direction, still grinning. “Want me to get your back?”

Abruptly, Eddie is reminded of that first night, when he thought about asking Richie for help with putting ointment on his scars. He never did actually ask; it still feels like crossing a line somehow. But now Richie is here, and he’s _offering_.

“Or, I guess you can probably figure it out,” Richie says, before Eddie can answer. He holds out the bottle like it’s a grenade; his smile takes on a brittle edge. “Here, I’m all done.”

He’s been doing that lately: tossing out his usual brand of casual flirtations and then backing off immediately. It throws off the comfortable rhythm of their banter and makes Eddie feel unbalanced. He’s trying to ignore it as much as he can, because it doesn’t take a mind-reader to figure out why Richie is so nervous about it now.

That, and Eddie is pretty sure that telling Richie any variation of, _You can flirt with me, I don’t mind_ , is not going to make things less weird.

“Sure,” he says instead. “You can get my back.”

He plops down on the towel and pulls his shirt off, presenting his back to Richie. Behind him, Richie takes a quick breath and doesn’t move.

“Well?” Eddie says.

“Yeah, okay, right.” Richie drops onto the towel behind him, too quickly, scattering sand. Eddie tracks the shadows of his hands as they lift, then drop. “Wait, should I stay away from the scar, or—”

“No, just go right over it,” Eddie says, trying not to flinch at the reminder. The one on his chest is bad; the one on his back is much worse, the skin puckered and distorted in a nightmarish patchwork from stents and skin grafts. He’s glad he doesn’t have to look at it, and the idea of Richie seeing it, let alone touching it, makes him squirm. But it’s too late to back out now.

Richie is just as gentle as he expected, his broad hands warm and careful as he smoothes sunscreen over Eddie’s shoulders and back, over the strange numbness of the scar tissue to the hollow of his spine, which seems to suddenly have too many nerves in comparison. Eddie breathes out slowly, holding himself very still.

“Here, let me just—” Richie murmurs, and then his fingers dip slightly under the waistband of Eddie’s trunks, spreading sunscreen across, then lift away completely. A moment later, the bottle lands in his lap. “You can take it from here, right?”

“Yeah, I—yeah, thanks,” Eddie says, but Richie is already standing up and moving away. Eddie carefully rubs sunscreen over his arms and chest and legs, then turns back toward the water as he pulls his sunglasses off to get his face. Richie is already several yards away, wading into the surf. As Eddie watches, he hits the drop-off and dives into the water, his pale body a smooth wet arc against the crashing waves. He surfaces a moment later to turn onto his back and float like an otter just past where the surf breaks.

Eddie finishes with the sunscreen, puts it back in the bag, then retrieves Richie’s abandoned glasses before they can end up buried. The white sand is almost hot enough to burn under his feet, but in a way that feels good—that makes him feel properly alive when it grits between his toes. He’s got a book, some trashy spy novel that’s perfect for dozing off to on a beach chair, but he can’t seem to focus on it. He ends up just watching Richie, the way his body moves easily with the water, his eyes closed, his face strangely naked without his glasses even at this distance.

He looks peaceful like this, and Eddie watches for a long time while he works up the courage to brave the disintegrated crab shells and fish shit and jellyfish and wade in after him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on [Tumblr](https://glorious-spoon.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/glorious_spoon) as glorious_spoon if you'd like to come say hi!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a call from Mike, a poolside wrestling match, and a resolution.
> 
> Or: here there be smut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, you may have noticed that the rating has changed! That's because this chapter ended up quite a bit more explicit than I intended, oops.
> 
> Warnings for, uh, explicit smut, and also Eddie having an unpleasant memory of the leper in Derry, though he gets past it quickly.
> 
> Thank you all so much for your lovely comments that kept me writing! I have some plans for a follow-up fic where R & E roadtrip across the country to get all of Eddie's stuff from his old house and visit the rest of the Losers, so that'll probably be up sometime in the next couple of weeks; in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this!

* * *

* * *

Mike videocalls them from Arizona a few days later. Or rather, Mike calls Richie from Arizona, and Richie flops onto the couch where Eddie is trying to write an email, crowding him to get them both in the frame.

“Get off me, asshole,” Eddie grumbles, and leans into Richie’s shoulder to wave at Mike, who appears to be sitting on top of a mountain. There’s a stark blue sky behind him, a steep rocky slope decorated with scrub grass and towering saguaro cacti. Mike is wearing reflective shades and a bright smile; he’s been growing out a beard, too, and it suits him. “Hi, Mike. Nice beard.”

“You think so?” Mike strokes his chin, grinning. “Still not sure about it.”

“Oh yeah. The whole rugged mountain man look suits you,” Richie says.

“I’m a _librarian._ ”

“Rugged mountain librarian,” Richie amends. “They have libraries in Arizona, right?”

“No, they still do it all by pony express,” Mike says. “Actually, I think I’m going to keep heading west, anyway.”

“Wait, to California?” Eddie asks, in the same moment that Richie whistles the bridge from _Go West, Young Man_. Eddie elbows him in punishment. When he looks up, Mike is watching them with a warm fondness that still seems kind of disbelieving after all this time. Eddie thinks that Mike, more than all of them, still has trouble getting his head around the idea that they’re all still _here_.

“Yeah,” he says. “I saw one ocean, I figure I should see the other one before I settle down.”

“You spent twenty years _settled_ in fuckin’ Derry,” Richie says. “You could just spend the next decade traveling the country.”

“Yeah, well, not all of us are millionaires, Rich.”

“Nah, man, what you gotta do is get set up with an Instagram account. Become an influencer. They love that kind of boho shit. Artsy topless photos, corporate sponsorship, whole nine yards. You’re definitely hot enough for it.”

Eddie flushes, but Mike is laughing. “Yeah, I don’t think so. This has been a good year for me, but I think I’m ready to find a place to put down roots.”

“Hey, whatever, man,” Richie says. “As long as it’s not Derry. You go back there after all this, we’re gonna have to stage an intervention.”

“So, you’re coming to L.A.?” Eddie interjects. “That was the subtext, right?”

“I was thinking about swinging up through Sequoia National Park first, but after that, yeah. Not sure how long I’ll be sticking around yet.”

“Well, you can always stay with us,” Richie says, then stops and gives Eddie a sheepish sidelong look. “Or, uh, me, I guess. Eddie if he’s still here. But there are three bedrooms, so…”

“Thanks,” Mike says, either oblivious to or ignoring the sudden awkwardness. Eddie feels like his stomach is trying to turn itself inside out; he’s suddenly very aware of how close he’s pressed to Richie. How easily Richie said, _us_. Fortunately, Mike is still talking. “I already talked to Bill, though—I’ll be staying with him and Audra for a little bit, and after that we’ll see.”

“Cool, cool,” Richie says, shifting slightly so that he’s not touching Eddie anymore. Eddie forces himself not to lean back against him. He doesn’t know what to think about the fact that Mike seems totally unsurprised that he’s still here. That _nobody_ has seemed surprised by it. That Richie still hasn’t fucking asked him when he’s leaving.

“Anyway,” he says, trying not to sound desperate. “Tell us about Arizona, Mike.”

“Well, you’ve seen all the pictures—”

“Yeah, I never realized you were so good at that," Eddie says. He's laying it on a little thick, but that's better than trying to look at Richie right now. "That shit should be in magazines, seriously.”

“Thanks, Eddie,” Mike says warmly. “It’s been great, honestly. It’s like a different world. The _heat_ , man. But you get used to it.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. First time I got off the plane here I thought I was walking into an oven.”

“It’s nice, though, isn't it? Hell of a lot different than Maine.”

“Yeah, fuck Maine,” Richie interjects with deep sincerity, and this time Eddie is the one who folds over laughing. Mike is laughing too, the sunlight reflecting on his mirrored shades and the wide desert landscape spreading out behind him, and even as uncertain as Eddie feels right now—it’s good. It’s good. It feels like healing.

* * *

They end up out by the pool after Mike signs off to call Stan and Patty. Richie is in swim trunks but he hasn’t gone in yet; Eddie rolls up his pants to dangle his legs in the water, watching the sunset turn the sky orange overhead.

“So, uh,” Richie says eventually, and Eddie tries not to let his shoulders tense visibly. “About what I said earlier—I mean, it’s none of my business.”

Eddie doesn’t have to ask what he means. “It’s your house, Rich. It kind of is your business how long I’m planning on camping out in your spare room.”

“Yeah, but.” Richie pauses, and when Eddie glances back at him he won’t meet his eyes. “I like having you here, man. But you have a whole life back in New York, so…”

“Not really,” Eddie says. He scoots backward out of the pool, feeling Richie’s eyes on him as he drops into the other chair and picks up his beer, more to fiddle with it than to drink. “I, uh. I should have told you earlier, but—I quit my job. I’ve been looking for something out here.”

“In L.A.?” Richie asks.

“Yeah.” Eddie looks down at his beer, then takes a drink. “Yeah. I haven’t heard anything back yet, but—anyway, Bill sent me his realtor’s information, once I have something lined up, I’ll start looking for my own place. I don’t want to overstay my welcome, or anything.”

“You told _Bill_ first?”

Eddie shrugs guiltily. “I mean, you didn’t ask.”

“No, I guess not.”

The silence stretches out. Eddie takes a long swallow of his beer, hoping that it’ll imbue him with some kind of courage. “Are you—I can’t tell if you’re pissed at me.”

“I’m not pissed,” Richie says, and when Eddie risks a glance at him, he’s smiling a little. It’s an odd smile, but it’s still there. “You don’t have to tell me everything.”

“I want to, though. I should have. I just… I don’t know.” Eddie pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m overthinking shit, I think.”

“You? No fuckin’ way.”

“Yeah, fuck you.”

Richie laughs, and Eddie lets his shoulders relax, relieved. “You can stay here. You know that, right? I like having you here. I would’ve said something if I didn’t.”

“Yeah, I know, but…” he trails off. “You don’t think it’ll get weird?”

“Why would it?” Richie asks warily.

“Not like, I mean—shit, sorry, I’m saying this all wrong, just—I don’t know. What if you wanted to bring a—a guy home? Like a date?”

“A _date?_ ” Richie asks, like it’s the most outrageous concept he’s ever heard of.

“Yeah,” Eddie says defensively. “What? It could happen.”

“Historically, not likely,” Richie says, but he sounds more relaxed now. Amused, almost. “I think you’re really overestimating how many guys in West Hollywood are dying to get with all this. I hook up with, uh, dudes on tour sometimes, but that’s just… I don’t know. Skeevy, on a number of levels. I don’t really…” he trails off, then wobbles his hand a little. He sounds awkward, but that might just be because they haven’t really talked about this. About sex, about the fact that Richie has sex with guys. The specifics of it. “You know. Actually date. Surprisingly, there's not a huge demand out there for schlubby middle-aged closet cases.”

Eddie squeezes his eyes shut. He really doesn't want to picture Richie _hooking up_ with some guy in an anonymous hotel room in fucking Reno or something. He takes a deep, steadying breath, lets it out, and then says, “Look. I’m going to say something sincere, and if you make fun of me I’m going to dump you in the pool.”

“Huh?”

“I mean it. You, the chair, all of it, right in the pool. Got it?”

“Okay, I got it.” Richie affects a serious expression. “Lay it on me, Eduardo.”

Eddie takes another breath, then says, “Stop saying shit like that about yourself, okay?”

“I—”

He chops the air sharply, and Richie shuts up. “I wasn’t done. You need to stop talking about yourself like that. You’re funny, and you’re smart, and you’re fucking charming when you want to be, and you’re—attractive, okay, I’m saying this as your friend, and I’m serious: you have a lot going for you, and any guy would be lucky to go home with you. Okay?”

Richie stares at him for a long moment, wide-eyed. His mouth is softly parted; he looks stunned.

Of course, then the moment ends, and he starts to grin. “Aww, Eddie…”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Eddie says, and sets his beer down to stand.

“Wait, wait, I didn’t mean it,” Richie yelps as Eddie advances on him. “I’m sincere, I’m being sincere, look at me, I’m totally sincere.”

“I take it all back, you’re an asshole,” Eddie says, and lifts the back of Richie's chair to heave him into the pool. He hits the water with a flailing splash, then surfaces a moment later, still laughing. Eddie folds his arms and glares down at him as he splashes to the edge of the pool and leans on it, grinning.

“That’s cold, man,” he says. “What if I’d lost my glasses, huh? What would you have done then?”

“Apologized,” Eddie says. “Maybe.”

Richie laughs and folds his arms against the edge. His wet shirt clings to the lines of his shoulders and biceps in a way that might actually be more distracting than if he wasn’t wearing one at all. He doesn’t make any attempt to pull himself out of the pool. “So, what about you?”

“What _about_ me?” Eddie asks.

“You asked about me bringing somebody home, which, like—yeah, not likely. What about you? You’re going to want to date again eventually, right?”

“I… not really. Not anytime soon, anyway. I just…” Eddie trails off and looks down at his hands. The words are at the tip of his tongue. _Hey, Rich, actually, I think I might be gay too. I think I might have been bullshitting myself this whole fucking time._

_I think maybe I want—_

He can’t get it out. Especially not that last part, but—any of it, really. It’s not even that he’s afraid. Richie is probably the safest person that he could possibly tell. It’s just fucking embarrassing. He’s forty-one years old. He should have figured this out by now.

“Come on,” Richie says coaxingly. “I have it on good authority that women really dig guys who compulsively do the laundry. I haven’t had this many clean clothes at a time since I stopped living with my parents. It’s hot.”

“You are _such_ an asshole,” Eddie sighs. He’s definitely blushing now. “I’m just not ready for it, okay? There’s some… stuff I need to work out first.”

That’s as close as he can come right now to saying the words out loud, and from the thoughtful, penetrating look Richie gives him, Eddie is simultaneously hopeful and terrified that he’s worked it out. He doesn’t ask, though. Instead, he says, “Hey, come here.”

“Why, so you can dunk me? I don’t think so.”

“Come on, man, I just need you to set my glasses somewhere so I don’t actually lose them.” Eddie narrows his eyes, and Richie slips his glasses off, holding them out with a very innocent look. “Please?”

“Fine,” Eddie sighs, and crouches down to take them. He has just enough time to set them down on the seat of Richie’s chair before Richie surges out of the pool like some kind of fucking sea monster to catch him around the waist and drag him in. Eddie lets out a mortifying shriek even though he was expecting it, then hits the cool water and lets himself sink down when Richie lets go of him before kicking to the surface. His wet pants cling to his legs, hobbling him enough to make it difficult.

“You _motherfucker,_ ” he hisses.

Richie is laughing again. “Hey, don’t dish it if you can’t—”

He breaks off as Eddie dives at him, forcing his head under the water. Richie could probably fight him off if he felt like it, but he doesn’t. He just grabs at the back of Eddie’s neck as he goes under, pulling him down too. It’s like being back at the quarry, grappling in the murky water and pretending they were trying to murder each other.

Looking for an excuse to touch.

Richie slips out of his hands a moment later, then grabs him around the hips to drag him down. And the thing is, Eddie knows that it’s just that he’s trying to avoid jostling the mostly-healed injury by grabbing at his shoulders or arms, but it feels almost painfully intimate. When they surface this time, gasping, they’re face to face, way too close. One of Richie’s hands still rests on his hip, large and warm, like they’re slow-dancing in the water. Eddie is hanging onto him, fingers digging into his upper arm for balance, and their feet bump as they kick to stay upright.

It’s a moment that seems to stretch out for an eternity. Eddie thinks that any second now one of them will let go, pull back, make a joke—that Richie will spit a fountain of water at him so he can yelp and flail and swear about it, or he’ll try to force Richie’s head underwater again, and normalcy will be re-established, but that doesn’t happen.

Richie’s hand flexes on his hip, fingers digging in, and Eddie inhales sharply. This close, there’s no way that Richie missed it. He goes to pull back, and Eddie tightens his grip, and their eyes meet.

Richie’s face always seems strange without his glasses, almost uncomfortably bare. His eyes are luminous in the dim light, pupils dilated until there’s just a thin rim of blue around them. This close, he must be able to see Eddie just fine, but he still looks like he’s trying to focus—like he’s seeing something he didn’t expect and can’t quite believe is there.

Wildly, Eddie thinks, _I could—I could, right now, I could just—_

“Eddie,” Richie whispers, a dry rasp, and Eddie is sure, he’s completely sure, that he sees Richie’s gaze flick down toward his mouth.

A siren goes whooping down the main boulevard five blocks over, and just like that the spell is broken. Eddie jumps, and Richie lets go of him, expression shuttering.

 _No, wait, come back,_ he thinks, but Richie is already moving away, and Eddie’s pants are tangling around his legs like weeds threatening to drag him down.

“I should, uh.” He flails his way over to the side of the pool, and pulls himself out, landing on the patio in a wet, awkward tumble. “I should go get some dry clothes on.”

“Right, yeah,” Richie says behind him. His voice is unreadable, and when Eddie turns back toward him, he’s not meeting Eddie’s eyes. He swims over to the edge of the pool, much more gracefully than Eddie managed, and pulls himself out. Water sluices off of him, his clothes clinging to the lines of his torso, the lean muscles in his thighs, and Eddie takes a shaky breath, drags his eyes away, and escapes into the house without a backwards glance.

He’s already in his room when he finally hears the patio door open again, then shut. There’s a clatter, then Richie swears softly. A moment later, his soft footsteps move across the house. His bedroom door opens, then shuts.

Eddie knocks his head lightly against the wall, then gathers up dry clothes and takes himself over to the bathroom before he can drip on the floor any more.

He rinses off the chlorine in the shower, changes into dry clothes, and hangs his soaking wet ones on the edge of the tub. Even though he got dressed in the bathroom like he always does, he feels intensely awkward sneaking across the hallway with a damp towel to mop up the worst of the puddle of chlorinated water he left on the floor of his room. Richie is nowhere to be seen, but Eddie can hear the shower running in the other room. It shuts off as he goes to hang the towel up, and there’s the sound of Richie moving around behind the door. He’s not whistling the way he usually does.

Eddie feels like the worst person on earth, and he’s not even sure if it’s for the fact that he almost just kissed Richie, or the fact that he _didn’t_.

That he fucking chickened out, once again. Like he always does.

Back in his room, he sits down on his bed, and rubs both hands through his wet hair until it’s sticking up in absurd spikes. He feels jittery, wired, restless, shot full of adrenaline like he’s been fighting or falling.

“Fuck,” he mutters, then pops up to his feet, paces the length of the room, pauses by the window, looks out. He can still see their wet footprints on the patio. The chairs crowded close together.

Before he can talk himself out of it, he slips out of the room, crosses down the hallway, and stops outside of Richie’s door. He shifts his weight, crosses his arms, then uncrosses them and knocks.

It feels a little like standing in front of the house that first day, months ago. Waiting for Richie to let him in. It feels like it takes at least as long before he hears the bed springs creak, and then soft footsteps. The door swings open, and Richie is standing there in a Pink Floyd t-shirt and plaid boxers, his damp hair at least as much of a wreck as Eddie’s is. The room is dim, a single lamp on the dresser turned almost all the way down. It’s just enough to illuminate the disheveled bed, the clutter of unfolded laundry on the floor, and Richie’s guarded expression.

“Eds?” he says.

Eddie takes a deep breath. “I’m really sorry. Can I come in?”

“What for?” Richie asks, but he’s already standing aside instead of slamming the door like Eddie was afraid of. He sounds determinedly nonchalant. “Yeah, sure, what’s up?”

“I. Just now, in the pool.” He stops.

Richie makes a face, scrunched up and awkward and just exaggerated enough that he’s clearly aiming for comedy, even if he doesn’t quite get there. “Yeah, look, I’m sorry I made it weird. We’re both too fucking old to be horsing around like that anyway. How’s your shoulder?”

It’s an out, Eddie knows, but he doesn’t take it. “It’s fine. And you didn’t make it weird, I did. I’ve been thinking, I wanted to tell you—”

“What?” Richie asks, softly. He’s wearing his glasses again—he must have retrieved them from his chair on his way in—but his expression is very nearly the same one he was wearing in the pool. Intent, searching.

Like always, it’s intoxicating to be the singular focus of all his attention.

“Just please tell me I’m not reading this all wrong,” Eddie says all in a rush, and closes the distance between them to kiss Richie clumsily on the mouth.

For a moment, Richie is so still that Eddie is sure he’s made a catastrophic miscalculation. He’s about to pull back and start apologizing when Richie makes a soft, swallowed noise that sounds like Eddie’s name, and kisses him back. He’s careful about it, almost tentative, which is not what Eddie would have expected of Richie Tozier; his hand hovers over Eddie’s cheek for a moment before settling lightly against it, thumb sweeping over his cheekbone. Eddie sighs into the kiss, and then Richie pulls back. Not much; just enough to rest his forehead against Eddie’s.

“Holy shit,” he says into the quiet space between them.

Eddie laughs raggedly. His heart is racing again; Richie is still touching his cheek, and he swears he can feel every single nerve ending beneath his warm palm. “You’re such a fucking romantic.”

“You want romance, I’ll give you romance. Jesus Christ, Eddie. What the hell.”

“Is that good, or bad?”

Richie breathes out a quiet laugh. “You really have to ask?”

“You’re not as transparent as you seem to think.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“I didn’t know,” Eddie admits. “Before I came out here, I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t know,” Richie repeats slowly, like he’s turning it over, trying to pick out the meaning. “Like—about _this_ ,” he gestures between them with his free hand, then settles it lightly on Eddie’s hip. Eddie _burns._ He suppresses his reactive twitch for fear that Richie will pull away again. “Or…?”

“Or any of it. Anything. I didn’t _know_. Fucking—when Myra called the other day, she asked me if I’d been having an affair with you, and—”

He’s not that surprised when Richie starts laughing, but he smacks him lightly with the hand still at his nape anyway.

“Dude, it’s not funny. I had a fucking crisis about it.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Richie says, composing himself, barely. “Hey. I’m sorry. I’m a dick.”

“I know you’re a dick,” Eddie grumbles. “Apparently that’s my type.”

“Oh, man. I’m sorry,” Richie gasps, laughter leaking out around the edges of his voice, and leans down to kiss him again. “Join the club.”

“Oh, _fuck you_ ,” Eddie says, but his mouth won’t stop smiling, so it doesn’t come out as rudely as he intends.

“I mean, if you want—” Richie begins, still laughing, and Eddie yanks him down into another kiss.

It’s less tentative this time. Richie is less tentative about it: his hand is on Eddie’s jaw to tilt his head up, his tongue slipping at the seam of Eddie’s lips until Eddie opens up to let him in. He’s taller than anyone else Eddie has ever kissed, by a lot, and there’s something thrilling about that—about the _size_ of him, his broad shoulders and big hands and the rasp of stubble when Eddie pulls back to kiss along his jaw.

He gets a little distracted by it, actually, nosing down Richie’s throat, worrying at the hot skin there with his teeth until there’s a purpling mark when he pulls back.

“Did you just give me a hickey?” Richie asks breathlessly. “You fucking maniac.”

“Yeah, well, what are you going to do about it?” Eddie retorts, which is the sort of challenge that Richie apparently still can’t resist. He leans into Eddie and traces inside the shell of his ear with his tongue. It’s wet and lewd and just—objectively gross, and it sends a jolt of heat to Eddie’s groin.

“Holy fucking shit,” he manages, weakly. Richie laughs right in his ear and does it again. Eddie grabs at him, hauling him closer, and it’s only then that he remembers that Richie is still in just his underwear.

Also, they’re both starting to get hard.

His own erection is a surprise; he can’t remember the last time he was this turned on just from kissing someone. And it’s weird that it’s a guy, it’s really fucking weird that it’s _Richie_ who can apparently get him jittery and overwhelmed like this just from some high-school making out, but that’s nothing on the fact that he can feel Richie’s dick pressed against his stomach, a stiff line of foreign heat.

“Okay, okay, Jesus,” Richie says, and starts to pull back. He sucks in a breath when Eddie tightens his grip, fingers digging into the faint give of fat and muscle over his hip bones. His shirt is rucked up so that there’s just warm skin under Eddie’s hands. Eddie wants to fucking _bite_ him. “Eds?”

“Shut up,” Eddie says, and does bite him again, just below the hickey he already left. Richie makes a little punched-out noise in the back of his throat, his hips stuttering forward. It makes Eddie want to grab at him, to shove them both down on the bed, to drop to his knees right there—makes him want a dizzying array of impractical things that he’s not even sure are on the table, and he pulls back just slightly, pushing his burning face into Richie’s shoulder, his thin, body-warm t-shirt, smelling soap and the faint tang of chlorine still clinging to his skin.

“Eds,” Richie says again, carefully. “You good?”

Eddie groans. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

“You don’t actually have to jump right in the fucking deep end, you neurotic little vampire,” Richie says. It’s gentle, but it’s also just mean enough for Eddie to laugh and bite him again, a sharp nip, all teeth. It must hurt, because Richie hisses through his teeth, but Eddie is pretty sure he feels Richie’s dick pulse where it’s trapped between their bodies, which is—certainly something. Richie lets out a shaky breath and says, “We can go slow. Or, you know. Go sit on the couch and talk about it. Or something.”

“I don’t want to fucking go slow,” Eddie says, kissing the mark he just made in apology. “I’ve been going out of my mind here. I just. I think I might suck at it?”

Richie folds against him, wheezing laughter, and before Eddie can get too offended about that he presses a lingering kiss to Eddie’s mouth and says, “Eddie, baby, where you’re concerned I am the world’s easiest lay.”

“ _Baby,”_ Eddie mouths. It’s mortifying, how much he likes the sound of it like that in Richie’s mouth. Sweet, without any of the sharp edges they normally use on each other.

Richie grins and kisses him again. “Honey. Sweetheart.”

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.”

“No,” Eddie admits. “I don’t.”

“Yeah, likewise,” Richie says, and it’s so tender that it feels like a bruise. His fingers slip up under Eddie’s shirt. “Tell me if you don’t want this.”

“I want this,” Eddie says, and reaches back to haul his shirt the rest of the way off, before he can get too nervous about it.

“Jesus Christ,” Richie sighs. His hands slide up Eddie’s sides, then stroke down over his shoulders. It’s reverent in a way that he didn’t think Richie was capable of, in a way that makes any of his lingering fears about the grotesque scarring on his chest vanish. Richie touches him like he’s unwrapping the best present he’s ever gotten in his life. “Happy fucking birthday to _me_.”

“Your birthday’s in March, dumbass.”

“Oh, yeah, call me some more names, baby,” Richie says, deadpan. “It turns me on _so bad_.”

“I honestly can’t tell if you’re joking.”

“I would never joke about this,” Richie says, and lets Eddie shove his shirt up and out of the way. It gets tangled up around both of their hands as they try to get it over his head. He’s pink and laughing, glasses askew, by the time Eddie finally tugs it off and tosses it somewhere over his shoulder, where it’ll inevitably get lost in the chaos on his floor.

It’s hard to be nervous with Richie: this feels in some ways not that different than wrestling him in the hammock or in one of their beds when they were kids. Or on the couch, a few weeks ago, or in the pool, half an hour ago. Like maybe they were always heading inevitably for this.

“You joke about everything,” Eddie says.

“Yeah, but I genuinely do love it when you’re mean to me.”

“Sounds like a personal problem.”

“Nah, just a kink.” Richie kisses him again, still smiling. His fingers slip beneath the waistband of Eddie’s pajama pants: not quite shoving them down, not yet, but the potential is there. Eddie takes a deep, shuddering breath, and before Richie can ask him _again_ if he’s sure about this, he reaches down between them to cup Richie’s cock where it’s straining at the front of his boxers.

“Jesusfuckingchrist,” Richie breathes against his mouth, all one word, shocked slurry consonants like he was still expecting Eddie to pull away or turn this into some kind of joke.

“Is this okay?”

“Fucking— _yeah_ , it’s okay.”

“So it’s okay it I—” He shoves at Richie’s boxers until they’re down around his thighs, freeing his cock. It’s uncut, which Eddie already knew; big, like everything else about Richie. Hot skin and beading moisture at the tip that’s slick when Eddie rubs his thumb over it. It’s not a novel sensation, but there’s something very different about touching someone _else_ like this, and Eddie gets so distracted by his exploration that it takes him a moment to notice that Richie is shaking against him, fingers flexing restlessly on his hips. Eddie tilts his head and nudges him into a kiss, and Richie leans blindly into it, his eyes closed behind his glasses, mouth open and wet.

“You okay?” he asks, and Richie lets out another wheezy laugh.

“I’m fucking great. Are you trying to kill me here?”

“No,” Eddie says, and strokes him again, slow and deliberate. Richie shudders all over, and then his hands are shoving at Eddie’s pants with actual purpose now. Eddie lets him do it, shimmies his hips a little ridiculously to get them down without having to stop touching Richie. He kicks them off and pulls at Richie’s boxers until he gets the hint and shoves them off too. And then they’re naked, pressed close, Eddie’s cock sliding against the sweat-damp groove of Richie’s hipbone. “I’m not trying to kill you.”

“That’s fucking debatable.”

“We should, uh…”

“Bed?” Richie asks, like he was reading Eddie’s mind, and starts steering them that way when Eddie nods. It’s a clumsy stumble, since neither of them want to let go of each other, but eventually the mattress is there and Richie is spinning him around, crowding him onto it. Eddie falls back, seated, as Richie leans over him and kisses him again and then says against his mouth, “Can I blow you?”

Something sharp and not entirely pleasant passes through Eddie. It takes his lust-fogged brain a moment to identify it— _hey kid I’ll blow you for a dollar I’ll do it for a dime I’ll do it for free_ —

The moment he’s aware of the thought, he shoves it viciously away. He opens his eyes to see Richie looking at him: his pink cheeks, his messy hair, his glasses slightly fogged. He’s hot, and a little ridiculous, and as familiar as Eddie’s own reflection _._ He’s _safe_.

He sees Richie’s mouth start to open and knows he’s about to take it back; Eddie kisses him before he can do it.

“Yeah,” he breathes when they break apart. “Yeah, I want that.”

“Oh,” Richie says, sounding startled, “okay, then,” and he kisses Eddie for a long time before he finally sinks to his knees. There’s a faint crack as his joints bend, and Eddie would make some kind of joke about that if it weren’t for the fact that Richie is pushing his knees apart to settle between them, his big hands gripping Eddie’s thighs. Eddie feels broken open, exposed, embarrassed by it and embarrassed more by how much he likes it. Richie grins up at him, then turns his head to bite the tender inside of his thigh. Not gently.

“Jesus _fuck_ ,” Eddie yelps, heat blooming through him like a punch. “What the fuck was that?”

“Payback,” Richie says smugly, and slides his mouth over Eddie’s cock, swallowing him to the root.

The retort that Eddie was going to make comes out in a strangled groan that might just be the most undignified noise he’s ever made, in bed or out of it. At least Richie can’t laugh at him with his mouth full, although he makes a noise like he wants to. It shifts into a groan when Eddie touches his head, cups the back of his skull, sliding trembling fingers through his damp hair, and he can feel that too, a feedback loop of startled pleasure.

It isn’t the first time someone has done this for him, but it’s the first time in a while, and by far the most enthusiastic. Richie’s shoulders shift; his hand rubs over Eddie’s hip and then drops, and Eddie peels his eyes open to see that Richie has it down between his own legs, that he’s jerking himself off in the same rhythm he’s using on Eddie’s cock. His shoulder flexes, the head of his dick slipping red and wet through the circle of his fingers, and the whole thing is so obscene that Eddie has to squeeze his eyes shut, his cheeks flaming. Then he opens them again. Finds that he can’t look away.

“Rich.” It comes out rough and uneven. “You—you better not make yourself come before I do, I want to do that for you—”

Richie pulls off to press his face into Eddie’s thigh, the frame of his glasses digging in. “ _Fuck_ , Eddie.”

His voice sounds fucking wrecked. Beset by a strange tenderness, Eddie slides his fingers through his hair again, and Richie turns his head to press a kiss to the hollow of his elbow before he fits his mouth over the head of Eddie’s cock again. His hands land on Eddie’s hips, dragging him forward until he’s almost sliding off the end of the bed, and Eddie grips his hair hard, somewhat accidentally, for mooring.

Richie groans loudly, and Eddie can _feel_ it this time, and he suddenly realizes what that shivery heat climbing through him means. He tries to choke out a warning, but Richie doesn’t pull back; he slides down farther and swallows around Eddie’s cock, his nose pressed into the dark thatch of Eddie’s pubic hair and his hands gripping him tight, and Eddie arches up into it and comes with a hoarse shout.

There are bright sparks behind his closed eyelids and his body still feels shuddery and warm when Richie finally pulls off. He settles his cheek against Eddie’s knee; his hands slip away from Eddie’s hips to brace against the edge of the bed. He’s still breathing hard, his shoulders heaving with it. From this angle, Eddie can’t see his expression.

He slides his fingers through Richie’s hair again, gentler this time, then over his cheek, his stubbled jaw, the slick curve of his mouth. Feels Richie’s breath hot against his fingers.

“You okay?” Eddie asks. He feels like his brain is only about fifty percent back online, but there’s a thread of unease winding through his pleasant post-orgasmic daze when Richie nods against his leg and doesn’t look up at him. He cups a hand under Richie’s chin and nudges his head up, and after a momentary hesitation, Richie lets him do it.

His mouth is red, his cheeks flushed, his glasses fogged. Eddie leans down to kiss him before he even thinks about what he’s doing.

There’s the bitter alkaline taste of ejaculate on his tongue, which is—okay, kind of gross, but it’s also weirdly hot, and it’s worth it for the way Richie shudders and then opens up to him.

He sighs when Eddie pulls back, then swallows, a hard click in the back of his throat. “Eds, you don’t have to—”

“Are you trying to give me an _out_ right now?” Eddie demands, outraged. “Is that why—?”

He breaks off, hooks his hands under Richie’s shoulders, and hauls him up onto the bed. It only really works because Richie starts helping him halfway through, but then they tumble onto the mattress, the rucked-up blankets lumpy beneath them. Eddie winds up on top, straddling Richie’s torso, his still-wet cock slapping between them as he leans down to kiss Richie again, furiously this time. Richie’s hands smooth up his back, then settle on his hips, and he lets his head fall back against the mattress when Eddie releases him.

“Okay, fine, I get it,” he grumbles, but he’s lost some of the tension. He’s looking at Eddie with a kind of wonderment that Eddie can hardly stand and definitely doesn’t deserve.

“You _better_ get it,” Eddie says back, which barely makes any sense, but he thinks that shifting back enough to grab Richie’s cock kind of makes the point for him.

He’s tempted to slide all the way down and return the favor, but the last thing he wants now is to risk freaking the fuck out halfway through, and anyway, this way he can watch Richie’s face while he touches him. Watch his slack mouth and his squeezed-shut eyes, the flush creeping down from his face to his chest while Eddie experiments with speed and pressure, trying things he does on himself and seeing how much Richie likes them too.

Richie holds pretty still to start with, fists clenched in the sheets so hard that the tendons stand out in his forearms, trembling with suppressed tension, but then Eddie lets him go to lick his own palm, wetting it before starting again, he makes a swallowed, hurt noise, his hips shifting. Eddie can feel the muscles in his thighs flex, lifting him slightly where he’s sitting across them. Richie could lift him up easily, he’s pretty sure.

Something to revisit, for sure.

“Eddie, Eddie,” Richie mumbles, and his hands flex, hauling at the sheets, and when he opens his eyes his expression is broken open, helpless, dazed, and Eddie has to pitch forward to kiss him. The angle is awkward like this, but he doesn’t pull back, and Richie curls into him, breathing open-mouthed against his lips. His hand comes up to grab at Eddie like he’s anchoring himself, and then his hips roll up off of the bed, his cock pulsing slick heat over Eddie’s fingers as he comes.

Eddie isn’t sure how long they stay like that, curled together in a sweaty heap. He lets his hand fall on Richie’s chest, feeling the speeding drumbeat of his heart, and only realizes a moment later that it’s the one still covered in come.

“Are you leaving jizz handprints on me?” Richie mumbles into his throat a moment later. It’s too late to get away with any kind of dignity, so Eddie pinches his nipple sharply instead. “Ow! Jesus!”

“You need another shower,” Eddie tells him, but he drops his hand, belatedly, to wipe it on the sheets.

“Yeah, whose fault is that?” Richie rolls away, though, sliding off of the bed. Eddie watches him: the breadth of his shoulders, the pale, freckled span of his back, the dip of his spine just above his ass. There’s jizz smeared across his chest and the softness of his stomach, his cock still hard, slick and red against his thigh, and Eddie thinks, dazed, _I did that._

Richie grabs his shirt off of the floor and cleans himself off with it, then tosses it at the hamper and tugs his boxers back on. He glances back at Eddie, then grabs his sweatpants and boxers unerringly from the tangle of clothes on the floor and tosses them to him.

“Thanks,” Eddie says, mortified.

The corner of Richie’s mouth ticks upward slightly, and he nods toward the bathroom. “Go ahead. I know you’re dying to wash your hands.”

Eddie would like to protest, but he’s right. He holds his sweatpants in front of him with his clean hand as he escapes into the en-suite bathroom.

The light seems very bright after the dreamy sunset glow of the bedroom. It’s cleaner than he would have expected, toiletries laid neatly out on the countertop, which is the same vaguely retro green glass tile as the bathroom that Eddie’s been using. The hand soap is expensive and citrusy in a glass pump dispenser. Eddie washes his hands thoroughly, then dries them on the towel hanging off the shower door, then untangles his boxers from his pants and pulls both on, wincing slightly at the chafing seams. Richie didn’t leave any marks on him, but he looks debauched all the same when he stares at himself in the mirror. Flushed pink with his hair all over the place, his mouth so red it seems bruised.

He can’t remember ever looking like this before. Ever feeling like this, so awake that he could shake out of his skin. Loose and warm from the memory of someone else’s hands on him.

The bedroom is empty when he comes back out. Eddie considers trying to locate his t-shirt in the chaos on the floor, then gives up and pads out into the darkened main house. Richie hasn’t turned any of the lights on, but Eddie drifts into the kitchen automatically, the tile cold on his feet.

“In here,” Richie calls quietly from the living room. He’s on the couch, feet tucked up under him like he’s a kid. His glasses reflect the moonlit glow coming in through the glass doors as he turns toward Eddie. He’s still shirtless, but he’s pulled pajama pants on over his boxers. He looks wary, almost skittish, and he twitches slightly when Eddie drops onto the couch next to him.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Richie says back, and swallows audibly, and then doesn’t say anything else.

Eddie breathes out into the quiet air. “Are you freaking out?”

“Are you?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie admits. “Yeah. A little bit, yeah.”

Richie nods. “Me, too.”

“Why? At least you fucking—at least you _knew_.”

“Yeah, but you’re like—” he breaks off, then laughs. “I had such a crush on you, man. Like, since we were kids. I never thought—”

“Wait, when we were _kids?_ ”

“I carved our initials on the Kissing Bridge,” Richie admits, rushed and uneven, and then he heaves forward so violently that for a horrible moment Eddie thinks he’s going to be sick. But he just curls around himself, tucking his arms in. It’s the kind of pose that Eddie hasn’t seen on him in months and months—since Derry. Like he’s trying to fold himself down, make himself small.

“Oh,” Eddie says, gut-punched and soft.

“Yeah. Fuckin’—that summer, after you broke your arm, when your mom had you on lockdown and the rest of us were fighting with each other, and—”

“Richie, you don’t,” he says helplessly, and reaches out, settling his hand on Richie’s shoulder, curling into him. They don’t really touch like this; they never have. They’ve never been gentle with each other, and that’s something Eddie always liked: that Richie would wrestle him into the dirt and put him into a headlock that he couldn’t get out of and pin him like that until Eddie shrieked at him—that Richie never seemed to know how to be careful with him, or even think that he should try.

Eddie has always taken his cues from Richie, and Richie has always seemed unbreakable.

But he wasn’t, really. Not now, and certainly not then. Eddie’s old enough now to get that, with the benefit of hindsight.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he says.

“I mean,” Richie says. “I just did, so.”

He splays his hands out like a Vegas performer, the sharp cut of his smile gleaming.

Eddie catches him by the back of the neck and kisses him hard, mashes his lips against Richie’s teeth, ugly and awkward. Richie subsides, laughs brokenly against his mouth, and kisses him back before sinking back into the couch.

“Sorry,” he says.

“I’m not fucking—” Eddie breaks off, breathes out harshly. “I wanted this, okay?”

“Okay,” Richie says, small.

“I’m sorry it took me so fucking long.”

Richie curves toward him, kisses him again. Gentler this time, and Eddie lets him do it. Lets him be gentle about it. That’s never been what he wanted from Richie, but they’re not kids now, and Eddie thinks he can re-adjust.

“What are we doing here, Eds?” Richie asks quietly when they break apart.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean. You said you weren’t ready to date yet, so…”

“Yeah, because I have this giant crush on my fucking _roommate_ , genius.”

“ _Roommate,_ ” Richie repeats, and then grins, startlingly bright. “I like it. Old-school.”

“God,” Eddie says fondly, “you’re such a pain in the ass.”

Richie’s eyebrows quirk, and Eddie doesn’t have to be a mind-reader to know exactly what he wants to say, but he manages to keep it behind his teeth for once. He leans down to kiss Eddie, then breaks away and says, “Hey, I meant what I said before. I like having you here. So you should stay. If you want to.”

“Okay,” Eddie says. “But fair warning, if I do, I’m not going to be sleeping in the spare room.”

“You know,” Richie says, a smile breaking across his face, “my bed is pretty big. I think we can make it work.”

“Well, good,” Eddie says, and leans in to kiss him again, leisurely and sweet. He really doesn't know what he's doing here, and maybe neither does Richie. But he thinks together they can figure it out.


End file.
